The Tyrones, like many well-to-do families, have serious problems. Regrets, and failed endeavors, have driven each of them—the parents and their two sons—into the recesses of addiction. Their story begins with an almost quaint joviality, but very soon the audience picks up on furtive glances, avoided topics. Argument turns on the edge of every joke, and Mary, the mother, keeps fretting about her hair. The Tyrone clan live under the same roof but, one realizes, not together, not really; something vital has been reduced in them, and by the end of Eugene O’Neill’s play, the extent of their desiccation will be made unavoidably clear.

“Long Day’s Journey into Night” might very well be the prior century’s greatest play, penned in morbid heartbreak by the playwright most responsible for the theater’s evolution into a serious medium in America. Long, setting-enclosed, and obsessively repetitive, it is one of those significant works of art that, by capturing something very specific—being the emotional turmoil of an early 20th century Irish-American family—manages to convey a great many universals, about the country and the self and existence. Of course, to say so has become cliché now, but it is nevertheless a rarer feat than one might assume given the phrase’s ubiquity. […]