What do The Count of Monte Cristo, a 19th-century French adventure novel, and Long Day’s Journey into Night, a 20th-century American drama, have in common? More than you’d think. Prologue Editor Catherine Foster talks about that connection with Long Day’s Journey director Christopher Liam Moore and the dramaturg for both plays, Lydia G. Garcia.

Chris, what has been your history with Long Day’s Journey into Night?

CLM: The play was in my bookcase growing up. I think it belonged to my oldest sister, who had read it in a college course. It was always there when I would go to sleep. I was so intrigued by it but never read it until I was much older, probably in high school. I didn’t really understand it then, but I kept coming back to it, as I tend to do with plays that I love. There’s something about the Irish-American-ness of it that struck a chord, since I’d grown up Irish Catholic in the Boston area. Certainly something about addiction and alcoholism resonates with me.

LG: We tend to think of domestic dramas as being on a much smaller scale, and we associate epic stories with battles over kingdoms or empires. Yet this is a domestic drama that is epic in a way that we don’t often get to see in the theatre.

CLM: There’s that great quote: “Before O’Neill, America had theatre. After O’Neill, we had drama.” In the cyclical nature of the language and the simplicity of the story—it takes place over just one day, with four family members in one room, and not a lot happens, plot-wise—something about it has such tremendous scope and ambition; it does feel Greek. It harks back to the fundamentals of tragedy in a great way.

At times in the play you think, these people hate each other, but there is love there. It’s just really deep.

CLM: Intimacy is a complicated swamp of emotions. You take as a given that the love is there, because O’Neill wrote the play as an act of forgiveness. So he loved these people very, very much. The great tragedy of the O’Neill family is not this period in their lives, it’s what came next after they reconciled: Within the course of three years, three of them were dead, all except for Eugene. That kind of tragedy one never recovers from, right?

The character of James Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey is based on Eugene O’Neill’s father, James O’Neill. Can you talk about James and his involvement with The Count of Monte Cristo?

LG: James O’Neill came to the United States in that first big wave of migration from Ireland and embodied the American dream in so many ways. He started as a poor Irish immigrant working in the miserable conditions of the 19th century. Then he decided to become an actor, of all things. He became an actor of promise, even though he didn’t come from a theatrical family. O’Neill had the great fortune of making his career in the theatres of Chicago and the Midwest, and on the East Coast, showing the promise that brought him to the notice of great actors like Edwin Booth. But then he encountered The Count of Monte Cristo. That became his vehicle to launch himself into the American theatrical imagination, but then he wasn’t able to escape that play because he was so successful. So the reason The Count of Monte Cristo has a hold in the American theatre is because of James O’Neill and his performance. Other actors, other adapters had tried to adapt that huge novel for European and American stages, but it wasn’t until O’Neill took Charles Fechter’s version and made it his own that it was finally successful.

Fechter was an actor in the 19th century who wrote at least two different adaptations of the novel. James O’Neill purchased the performance rights to the script in the 1880s and then began to shape it. He had an incredible dramatic instinct, not unlike Shakespeare.

CLM: The Count of Monte Cristo is so much about a good man gaining revenge on bad people who have done him wrong. It’s a complicated plot, but a very simple story, morally. I think it was the right vehicle at the right time and place for a country that had just come through this horrific Civil War and needed a good adventure yarn where the good guy wins. That play is a ghost in Long Day’s Journey as much as a person is. It defined the family’s fortunes, but it trapped James. He never became the great Shakespearean actor he thought he should be and other people thought he should be.

LG: And the tragedy of not realizing he was trapped until so many years into 6,000 performances? At the time it was exactly what he was hoping for: theatrical and professional success. We’re shaped by our earliest experiences, and for James O’Neill, the terror of being poor, of being on the streets, was an overarching story in his life. To not realize how a gift becomes a curse until he’s reaching the twilight years of his life, I can’t even imagine what that was like for him, and for his sons to witness that.

What was the thinking behind OSF pairing Long Day’s Journey and The Count of Monte Cristo?

LG: Count came up organically, because we’d been talking about producing Long Day’s Journey for years. It’s been a passion project for us. I remember a conversation in Boarshead [OSF’s play-reading committee] where someone facetiously said, wouldn’t it be fun if we did Long Day’s Journey and The Count of Monte Cristo in the same season? Because those two plays are so intricately connected—theatrically but also biographically. At the time, we thought about having the same actor play James Tyrone and the Count, which I’m sure would have killed the actor eventually!

CLM: I’d love for people to see both plays if they can. It doesn’t matter in which order they see them—mostly, Long Day’s references Monte Cristo—but I think it’s a very rich experience to be able to see both.

LG: Absolutely. I think both plays are epic, they’re heroic, they’re atmospheric, they’re metaphorical in so many ways, and I’m so happy that we’re doing them together. I think seeing Count will probably make James Tyrone so much more relatable as a character, and having met James Tyrone and then see a suggestion of him in his youthful glory might make that tragedy that much more poignant. I think both stories rely so much on silence, on movement, on music, on the environment; whether it’s the sea around the Château d’If or the fog rolling in across the Sound, you know the entire universe is involved in these two stories.

For more information about Long Day’s Journey into Night, click here, and The Count of Monte Cristo, click here.

For an interview with Michael Winters and Judith-Marie Bergan, who play James and Mary Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey, click here.