The small rectangle, rugged with worn Oriental rug holding mismatched chairs around a table, is so wretched that no wonder Mary Tyrone inveighs against its cheapness. In this terrible seaside summer home in 1912, the Tyrone family will come together (after James and Jamie's yearly theatrical touring) and fall apart. Despite wife and mother Mary Tyrone seeming recovered from morphine addiction, she's on the brink of returning to drugs. Jamie Jr., a misfit as actor in his father's company, will come in from drinking and whoring, soon to denounce and try to break with both parents. Young son Edmund is about to get a diagnosis of TB from a doctor (quack or not?) hired by pennypinching James.
The past, especially James' hiring of a bad doctor who got Mary on drugs after Edmund was born, seeps into the present like the fog that will engulf her. James' miserly ways, caused partly by his fear of dying without property and penniless, penetrate all the family's actions and interactions. He uses buying property as a drug to forget his decision to abandon a great acting potential for a high-profit, one-role career. Dependent on him for a living, Jamie drinks incessantly. Edmund, a would-be writer, retreats into books. Mary's re-living the mistakes of the past brings them into the cottage while the drugs allow her to go far enough back to escape into a youth and marriage that are also part hallucination.
As the tragic Mary, Sarash Bartlett drives herself and others on the long journey of the play's title. She's touching even when she goes overboard with self-pity. At closest range, she never falters except as Mary prowls in nightgown and scripted uncertainty. Her sustained performance is matched by Randall Holden's handsome James. His deference to her in the opening scene shows the best side of him, which he builds on to win sympathy for his disappointment later, even as James' bad points keep getting stressed.
Unhappily, neither Ron Crooks nor Roderick Evans come near being their "parents'" sons either in looks or believability. Crooks is way too bombastic; his Jamie is unlikeable. With drooping eyelids, Evans looks like sick Edmund but substitutes stiffness and a monotone for disappointment and a young lad's fright at the prospect of entering a cheap sanitarium. As a brash serving girl, Nela Lamb stomps and sasses believably. Her Irish accent might benefit from slight attenuation.
Ultimately, the poignancy of Bartlett and Holden carries into the play's bleak night.
