Photo credit: Jez Smith
We will be in Portland on Sunday for the afternoon presentation of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night. Seeing this production is our early anniversary gift to ourselves so we splurged and will be sitting center front row.
William Hurt, whose acting I have admired for a long time, stars as James Tyrone. The play is directed by Andrew Upton, who is co-artistic director with wife Cate Blanchett of the Sydney Theater Company. It opened in Sydney, where Time Out Sydney published this review (opening paragraph below):
For a few years in the 1980s William Hurt was one of the biggest stars in Hollywood. The Washington DC-born actor (The Big Chill, Broadcast News, Gorky Park) won an Oscar for Kiss of the Spider Woman playing Molina, a gay window dresser in a South American prison who survives day-to-day on his memories of trashy old movies. To see Hurt, now 60, playing Eugene O'Neill's deluded patriarch James Tyrone in Long Day's Journey into Night on the Sydney Theatre stage, is to experience the unique privilege of watching an actor who excels at conveying self-deception. His eyes deep-set and distant, his voice, a somnolent, teasing murmur, Hurt's very presence seems to be struggling from the depths of a pleasant dream into the cold light of day.
This is a video trailer about the production:
"Long Day's Journey Into Night" Aug. 13-Sept. 5 from Artists Repertory Theatre on Vimeo.
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