The dysfunctional foursome of the spring 2003 Broadway revival of Long Day's Journey Into Night will be played by Brian Dennehy as miserly patriarch James Tyrone, Vanessa Redgrave as addicted wife and mother Mary Tyrone, Robert Sean Leonard as sickly son Edmund and Philip Seymour Hoffman as wastrel son James (Jamie) Jr., a spokesman confirmed.
Robert Falls directs the Broadway staging at a theatre to be announced. May 6 is the tentative opening date, after previews. Falls helmed a 2002 staging at The Goodman Theatre in Chicago, with Dennehy, who is the only holdover from that mounting. Producer David Richenthal, Max Cooper and Anthony and Charlene Marshall and Clear Channel Entertainment are behind the new Broadway production, inspired by the Goodman staging. Designers are Santo Loquasto (set and costume), Brian MacDevitt (lighting) and Richard Woodbury (sound).
Casting for the role of Irish maid Cathleen has yet to be announced.
The rich family drama by O'Neill, inspired by events and tensions in his own family, is set in 1912, in the New England home of a miserly actor whose poet son is tubercular and whose wife is drug-addicted. Both ailments are due to ineffective treatments from the local quack doctor (used by the family because he's so affordable, son James accuses). On a long summer day, the family members scratch and probe their pasts and their choices, tugging at the mask of denial in their shared experience.
O'Neill demanded the play not be performed until 25 years after his death (he died in 1953), but its American premiere came in 1956, directed by Jose Quintero. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The first New York staging starred Jason Robards Jr. as Jamie; he would later play the aged Jamie in the related O'Neill Play, A Moon for the Misbegotten. *
Falls, Dennehy and Richenthal are the team that gave Broadway the Tony-winning revival of Death of a Salesman.
Redgrave is, along with Judi Dench and Maggie Smith, one of the leading actresses of London theatre. She last acted on Broadway in Tennessee Williams' Orpheus Descending in a grand performance that divided critics. Since then, she has appeared Off Broadway in Vita and Virginia, with Eileen Atkins, and Antony and Cleopatra at the Public Theater.
Leonard won the Tony Award for The Invention of Love, Hoffman appeared in True West on Broadway and in The Public Theater's summer staging of The Seagull, with Meryl Streep.
