Once Upon a Long Day

One long summer day, the Tyrone family has to confront a difficult truth, hidden for years. As the day turns into night, a family inferno of mutual resentment and accusations grows between father, mother and two adult sons. As in a Greek tragedy, over the course of several hours, the protagonists will face their own past, the lies about themselves and their sense of guilt. Will the truth about themselves set them free? 

“Long Day’s Journey into Night”, an autobiographical play by American classic playwright Eugene O’Neill written in 1941, is a study of the downfall of a family that is destroyed by addiction and lies. A study so realistic that the author banned its publication during his lifetime out of concern for the memory of the loved ones on whom the characters are modelled. The play was staged in 1956, three years after his death. It became an immediate event and O’Neill was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for it.

“Once Upon a Long Day”, directed by the outstanding Belgian director Luk Perceval, is his adaptation of O’Neill’s drama, interpreted through the prism of contemporary addiction issues. Western societies are no longer only addicted to alcohol and drugs, as in O’Neill’s time, but also to social media, computer games, pornography, work, shopping. The stimulants change, but the mechanism of addiction remains the same. What void do addicts try to fill within themselves? What makes them escape from reality into a world of illusion? Why do they avoid the pain that life brings, and how can they confront this pain?

“I know of no production that has been so radically stripped of its staging apparatus, utterly focused on the phenomenal artists of the Stary Theatre”, wrote Jacek Wakar. According to Karolina Felberg („Kultura Liberalna”), the Flemish director made Zawadzka, Garncarczyk, Stawarczyk and Kubacki play they roles at the highest possible level” 

The play “Once Upon a Long Day” is being staged by special arrangement of National Stary Theatre with the United Talent Agency. This version of the play has been altered from the original publication by Eugene O’Neill. In the spectacle a fragment of a book by Stephen A. Black “Eugene O’Neill. Beyond Mourning and Tragedy” (Yale University Press, New Haven and London 2002),copyright © 2000 Stephen A. Black – has been used.