“The past is the present, isn't it? It's the future, too. We all try to lie out of that but life won't let us.”  

        When, approaching the end of his life, Eugene O'Neill wrote his final play, "Long Day's Journey Into Night," he believed to be basically  unproducible. This was chiefly because it was the most personal play he had ever written concerning  his family and his personal life before he became the playwright he was. He saw it as a release from the tensions that had informed his existence. while at the same time he was able, emotionally, to alter that image presented in his earlier work, "Ah, Wilderness," a light comedy about the family in their summer home, which is the setting of this last play also. Set in 1912, two years before his first plays were produced, Edmund (based on the author; in the play a dead brother named Eugene is talked about) is suffering from a bad cough and too much drinking, after a brief "career" at sea. His older brother, Jamie, suffers also from too much drinking and the constant harangues from his father James Tyrone - a famous actor (based on O'Neill's own father famous for his portrayal of the Count of Monte Christo) and the over-bearing concerns of his mother, Mary. As an auto-biographical play we might assume that the play is about himself, and so about Edmund, but that is not the case. The play is about Mary, Eugene O'Neill's mother, Mary Ellen Galligan. Addicted to morphine and other drugs she is a highly unstable woman whose emotions drag her through a bipolar existence. Writing this play about her in 1941 it dragged O'Neill through a personal hell he had professionally avoided for most of his life. When he died in 1953 the play was still unknown and presumably lost forever until his widow, Carlotta Monterey pulleld it out and allowed it to be produced. The rest is Theatrical History.