Word: neill
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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There are few better measures of how tortuous the journey toward racial equality has become since 1954, when the Supreme Court struck down segregation, than the history of last week's ruling in Sheff v. O'Neill. The case was filed in the state courts in 1989 because civil rights lawyers had concluded that there was no hope of redress from the conservative U.S. Supreme Court. Connecticut's constitution, on the other hand, explicitly guarantees the right to a free, unsegregated public education, which made the state a more promising venue. "We were looking for new ways to breathe life...
...wrenching fourth act of Eugene O'Neill's autobiographical "Long Day's Journey into Night," Jamie, the older brother, grabs the O'Neill character and begs "Please don't forget me-- give me credit!". In "Journey", Jamie gets his wish; O'Neill encapsulates his ultra-dys-functional family, renamed "Tyrone", for one claustrophobic day in their Connecticut summer house, circa 1912. Though the play presents an equally hopeless portrait of each beleaguered Tyrone, it is the figure of Jamie, especially as played by Bill Camp in the ART's new production, around whom the plays' energies and tensions expand...
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...
...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...
...example of pork-barrel spending and vetoed federal funding for it--but the veto was overridden thanks to the enormous clout of the Commonwealth's Democratic heavy-weights on Capitol Hill, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy '54-'56 and the late Speaker of the House Thomas M. "Tip" O'Neill...