Word: edmunds
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Since its debut 30 years ago, the members of the doomed Tyrone family have become stock characters on the American stage, as familiar, and as problematic, as our own families. Edmund (Michael Stuhlbarg), the character representing O'Neill himself, is the frail, morbid young poet who in the course of the titular "day" finds that his mysterious "summer cold" is a case of deadly consumption, or tuberculosis. Worry over his weakening condition has driven his mothlike mother, Mary (Claire Bloom) to succumb to her addiction to morphine, a drug she has been hooked on since Edmund's birth 24 years...
Miserly father James (Jerome Kilty) worsens matters by denying the seriousness both of Mary's drug use andof Edmund's illness, trying to scrimp on a sanitarium for Edmund and taking out his anxieties on his elder son, the failed actor Jamie (Bill Camp). Jamie, already a depressed and cynical alcoholic, is now devastated by his mother's relapse and brother's illness, blaming his father's stubborn cheapness for both. As the day wears on, accusations, guilt and motivation for inexplicable past acts are revealed one by one, until a tragic pattern emerges, which the characters seem hopeless...
...Jerome Kilty. James sounds only one note, however solidly, for the first three acts of the play--miserly, grumpy, critical, nationalistic in that way peculiar to formerly poor Irish-Americans. Real character development for James comes only in the fourth act, in a monologue in which he admits to Edmund the mistakes that ruined his career. Unfortunately, he then promptly leaves the stage, so that any readjustment of our understanding of his character must come retrospectively, reconsidering his earlier actions with this new information. The effect is poignant, yes, and mimetic of the way all children reach an understanding...
Michael Stuhlbarg, as Edmund, gives the most unsteady performance of the protagonists, at some moments scintillating, at others invoking a sit-com like shrillness as Edmund screams at all the other characters to shut up. Again, the problem is partially with the role-- the Edmund character, a stand in for the playwright himself, must serve as straight man to the other characters' various emotional defenses and attacks, a non-character for them to play against...
...moments in which O'Neill allows Edmund "the touch of a poet", the artistic leanings present in O'Neill himself at the time the play is set, the writing is some of the best of the play. Stuhlbarg rises to the occasion with an intoxicating conviction and a fine control of intonation and gesture belying his top-notch training. His handling of the monologues describing Edmund's time at sea, and his recitation of the Decadent authors Edmund reads, are some of the finest, most piercing moments of the evening. The moments immediately proceeding these, where Stuhlbarg performs a drunken...