Threshold Stage Company presents "Long Day's Journey into Night" by Eugene O'Neill, directed by Peter Josephson at the Star Theatre at the Kittery Community Center, running September 29th - October 15th, 2017.
"Long Day's Journey into Night" is a theatrical masterpiece by one of America's greatest playwrights, Eugene O'Neill. Set in the coastal Connecticut town of New London in 1912, O'Neill's chilling autobiographical Pulitzer Prize winning play brilliantly and poignantly lifts the veil on a day in the life of the Tyrone family. Haunted by the ghosts of their individual and collective pasts, each character desperately and doggedly fights through the existential fog of love, loss, addiction and fear that shrouds their ability to find satisfaction and meaning in their lives.
In order to give Northern New England the opportunity to bear witness to O'Neill's haunting existential tour de force, Kittery's own Threshold Stage Company bravely embraces the challenge of staging "Long Day's Journey into Night", perhaps one of the most difficult plays to produce and perform in modern theatre. Rather than performing the play on a conventional proscenium stage, where the entire audience sits in front of the stage, director Peter Josephson and co-artistic directors Peter Motson and Heather Glenn Wixson made the innovative choice of presenting the performance on a thrust stage; placing the audience in a horseshoe arrangement around the action. Josephson believes this "allows the actors to have a greater freedom of movement and each audience member to see the story from a different point of view." "This way a character might, for a moment, be revealed to some people but hidden from others." Limiting the seating to thirty five patrons per show successfully establishes the intimacy of this production as set designer Alyssa LeBlanc's eerily stark and evocative set transports the audience into both the literal and metaphorical fog that the Tyrone family, like so many of us, must voyage through on their search for a deeper meaning to life. The cast of regionally recognized actors Heather Glenn Wixson, Peter Motson, Andrew Codispoti, Wayne Asbury and Casey Turner masterfully inhabit the space and serve as the perfect conduit to bring O'Neil's epic to life.
IF YOU GO:
LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT
When: Sept. 29th - Oct. 15th (Sept. 29th, 30th, Oct. 6th, 7th & 14th @ 7 pm, and Oc.t 1st, 8th & 15th @ 2 pm)
Where: The Star Theatre at the Kittery Community Center (120 Rogers Road, Kittery, ME 03904)
Run Time: Three and a half hours (4 acts)
Box Office: Ticket cost $25.00 (Tickets available online at kitterycommunitycenter.org/star-theatre or call (207) 439-3800)
*Recommended PG-13 due to intense subject matter*
Pictured: Heather Glenn Wixson as Mary Tyrone in Threshold Stage Company's Production of "Long Day's Journey into Night" at the Star Theatre Kittery, Maine. Photo by Monica Bushor.
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