Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night has American Premier at the Wilbur Theatre in Boston

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The American premiere of "Long Day's Journey Into Night" by American playwright Eugene O'Neill was performed at The Wilbur Theatre from October 16-27, 1956, and was described as "one of the splendid. dramatic accomplishments of the decade."

Boston Globe theater critic Cyrus Durgin wrote the glowing review of the production, director and actors, and to the playwright himself.

"As matters have turned out, this the last play left to us by the late Eugene O'Neill. More than that, it is a great play, with three its roles supremely well acted, and it has been staged with comprehension 'and a sensitivity which are absolute. At the final curtain the house rang with cheers--something almost unheard a Boston theater in this reviewer's time.

"The acclaim obviously was directed at Frederic March, Florence Eldridge and Jason Robards Jr., but it must also have included the creator of this piercingly emotional drama. Long Day's Journey Into Night is great, though not in the sense of high tragedy with its classical austerity, It is great as an intense personal threnody, a symphony pathetique of lost souls and old horror, of corrosive memories and an urge to exorcise malignant ghosts."

Eugene O'Neill

The play, Durgin wrote, is "a confession out of O'Neill's own past and his own family, which now puts in a sudden blaze of understanding that darkly haunted artist who found life so bitter, hope so futile and humankind so base."

Considered on of the great playwrights of his time, O'Neill won four Pulitzer Prizes and  the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936 for works that included The Iceman Cometh, Mourning Becomes Electric, Emperor Jones and many others.

O'Neill died of bronchial pneumonia at the Hotel Shelton on Bay State Road in Boston on November 27, 1953, at age 65. His wife Carlotta Monterey was by his side. 

O'Neill tombstone at Forest Hills Cemetery

O’Neill is buried at the Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plains, a neighborhood of Boston.


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