Who has the script for Long Night? ?

There is always a feeling of heavy heart when watching O 'Neill's plays. No matter how hard the characters in his works struggle, they can never find their own foothold, and the hardships and futility of struggle have dyed this pursuit with a strong tragic color. For example, his distinctive and unique autobiographical drama Long Night is the most influential one in his series.

Long Night tells the story of an Irish immigrant family from morning till night. There are no bizarre plots and shocking external conflicts in the play, but love and hate interweave between father and son, husband and wife, mother and son, and brothers, which violently stir the hearts of every audience through the conversation, accusation, abuse, caress, self-blame and comfort of four people.

Tyrone, the father of Long Night, was an actor. He was among the rich because he successfully played the Count of Monte Cristo, but he was stingy and bossy at home. Mother Mary cut off contact with friends and family because of her husband's social prejudice against actresses, and spent most of her time alone in cheap hotels, with nowhere to pour out her feelings. She was depressed for a long time, and quacks treated her with morphine, which gradually made her get into the bad habit of taking drugs. Her eldest son, Jamie, has no fixed job, idles all day, drinks and gambles, goes into brothels and leads a dissolute life, becoming an art vagrant on Broadway. The youngest son, Edmund, is sickly and suffering from chronic tuberculosis. He is pessimistic and disappointed about the future and indulges in unrealistic imagination.

From here, we can see that Long Night is an artistic representation of O 'Neill's tragic family life, so it can move the hearts of audience friends more in content and emotion. Winser, a famous critic, once commented: "As a dramatist, O 'Neill's determinism philosophy makes his tragedy more reasonable and emotionally convincing. "

When we deeply sympathize with the characters in Long Night, some friends think that Mary is the meanest and most annoying person in the whole family, tormenting her family and herself and not worthy of sympathy. On the other hand, my view is just the opposite. Mary is the most fragile and tragic of the four members of the Tyrone family. Her tragedy comes from the process that she can't find her place constantly. This process is revealed by all kinds of fantasies, confusion, depression, pain and struggle in her pursuit of positioning herself. Mary's tragedy is no longer like Oedipus wandering around blindly and alone in ancient Greece, nor is it like Job being tortured and destroyed by God and suffering physical pain in the Old Testament. However, modern people no longer live like human beings, but are lost in the Faustian soul and suffer spiritual pain.

At the beginning of the long night, Mary's most obvious impression was that she was extremely neurotic. She has been guarding her family carefully, for fear that her family will discuss her drug abuse and treatment, and she has been staring at her. Its symptoms are like her hands are never stable. When her husband Tyrone joked that her two sons were in the kitchen and must be talking privately about something they didn't want people to hear, although Mary kept silent about it, her hands immediately moved uneasily on the table. Fingers flickered nervously on the table. When her smiling eyes suddenly met her son Jamie's disturbing questioning eyes, the smile on her face suddenly disappeared and her behavior became unnatural. Mary, who was extremely neurotic, was clearly presented to the audience.

In the performance of the whole play "Long Night", Mary was either stiff or embarrassed, or stroked her clothes anxiously, or moved things around the table aimlessly. This kind of anxiety symptom is similar to neurotic anxiety in psychology, including three necessary factors: First, the danger is not clear, but it seems to be coming soon. The intermittent cough of Edmond, the youngest son, is undoubtedly a dangerous signal, which always grabs his mother's fear; The second is the alert attitude towards danger. Although Mary was very worried about her son's illness, she refused to admit that it was tuberculosis and pretended that she had caught a cold in summer to calm her nervous heart. Third, the sense of powerlessness and loss of psychological peace to danger. Mary's apparent calm could not conceal her inner hesitation, and her unbearable psychological load was finally relieved by taking drugs again.

The root cause of this anxiety mentioned above is the lack of internal self-esteem and sense of value. Mary wouldn't feel so ashamed if Tyrone spent more money to build her a stable and decent home instead of letting her stay in a dirty hotel or a cheap summer "villa" all day. Maybe she will invite one or two neighbors to chat and kill time. But in that isolated life, Pacat bought it from a thrift store, used seaman as the driver, and Tyrone's old, dirty and ridiculous gardener's suit, which should have been thrown into the trash can, no decent girl wanted to accompany her son. All these make Mary fully realize the failure of being a human being.

This sense of failure not only touches the periphery of self-esteem, but also erodes the core of self-esteem, because nothing internal or external can serve as the basis of her personal value. Mary said bitterly to her youngest son Edmund, "I never felt that this was my home." I felt something was wrong from the beginning. Everything is cheap. Your father never spends money to make things look good. We don't have any friends here, and even if I did, I wouldn't have the face to let them come to our house. "

Mary fully understands what unforgettable loneliness is. Since taking drugs, she is even more reluctant to meet people. Her husband and son only know fooling around in clubs or bars. Everyone is watching her and no one believes her. She lives in such an atmosphere of constant suspicion. She can't wait to find a place to hide, even if it's one afternoon a day, or talk to her best friend, even if it's just a joke. But who can meet this simple requirement? For her, home is an important foundation for her to gain self-esteem and value. Her inner ideal position is bound to be reflected in the "home" constructed in her dream. A child can be a good child if he has a family, and a woman needs a family to be a good mother. At home, she can fully experience the happiness of being a wife and a mother.

Therefore, based on her parents' warm home, she constructed a family with status, wealth and popularity in her ideal, and used it as the basis for gaining self-esteem and value, and constantly measured the family formed with Tyrone.

For Mary, the summer house is always deserted, just like a dirty and cheap inn that stays for one night and leaves. What she can't stand is that she has been pretending to run it as a home, but the result is endless loss and melancholy. So I began to doubt my own value, and my sense of inferiority also came into being.

Mary's inferiority complex is not the product of comparison with others, but the result of her inner comparison, which is divorced from the actual value. Mary's inferiority complex is aimed at herself, which makes her present self and her past self start to oppose each other, feeling that her past self is better than her present self, or sketching out her ideal in her mind, hiding herself deeper in her heart and comparing with her present self, and finding a place to escape from reality and relax in her dreams.

two

Mary, the heroine in Long Night, was very happy when she was a child. She was born in a family with status, grew up carefree and received education in the best monastery in the Midwest. At that time, Mary was a very devout girl, sincerely believed in God and dreamed of becoming a monk or pianist in the future. All her grandmothers, nuns and classmates in the monastery praised her, and all her friends at that time had a beautiful home. They often communicate with each other, calm and happy.

At that time, Mary's inner, transcendental innocence, simplicity and natural charm made her a lucky person worthy of being loved. Mary's father is obedient to her, her grandmother loves her dearly, her classmates are friendly and warm to her, the warmth of love, the joy and satisfaction of being loved, which makes Mary's innocent girl image perfect. She is like a budding bud, healthy, lively and full of vitality.

Mary's girlhood is full and bright, just like the bedroom at 8: 30 at the beginning of the play. Sunny, unrestrained, free and full of youthful vitality. Mary's self-esteem is full and rich, her first role in life is so beautiful, everything in life is so relaxed and happy, and it is natural for her to have a beautiful family life model.

However, in later life, this beautiful ideal was swallowed up by the terrible reality, and Mary herself had to build a wall around her, or more like a thick fog, to cover herself and separate her family.

"something happened the next spring. I fell in love with James? Tyrone, how happy I was during that time! "At that time, Tyrone was radiant, as if from another world. She is recognized as one of the handsome men and an idol worshipped by opera fans. Besides, she is simple, kind, humble, unpretentious, vain and arrogant, which makes her shy, gentle and full of romance fall in love with Tyrone at first sight.

Therefore, Mary gave up the belief of being a nun, lost her dream of becoming a pianist and gave up her pursuit of girlhood. She became the wife of a touring actor wholeheartedly. This is a powerful force of love. They love each other, and the second role in life further inspired Mary's pursuit of a better life. This is the peak of Mary's life and the beginning of her unfortunate life.

From then on, real life pulled her out of the newly established love dream, and before she could taste the wine of love, she began to experience a depressed and lonely life. During the annual tour, Mary had to travel around in a dirty and uncomfortable second-class car, eat the worst food, stay in that disgusting and dirty hotel at night and wait for Tyrone to go home alone for hours. Even during their honeymoon, Tyrone got drunk in the bar and was left outside the hotel to be looked after by Mary alone. In the later days, Mary waited for her drunken husband to come home in those dirty hotels countless times, and she began to get used to it.

Therefore, Mary's second role was a failure. She began to lose herself, become numb and lose confidence in life. This confusion turned into despair after she experienced the third role in her life. She tried to kill herself. "I hope I accidentally took a dose of morphine. I intend to do that. This is absolutely impossible. In that case, the virgin will never forgive me. "

Later, the sons grew up one after another, and the bohemian eldest son Jamie made Mary feel more and more like a loser in life. Her eldest son has been addicted to debauchery for years and has no real love, which makes him a street prodigal who goes to brothels for fun as long as he has money.

In Mary's eldest son, there are obvious signs of premature aging, crushed by life, decadent and desperate, everything is illusory, and even the savior God has become a greedy snob. "Give God a few dollars and you will be saved. But if you have no money, you will go to hell. " Negative and pessimistic about life but helpless. "Everything is in order, no one can dominate, and the world is like a sad tear." "My name is Naihetian, also called regret. It's too late to sigh. Don't let bygones be bygones." Mary really loves and hates him. If Jamie lives in a decent family and gets a good education from childhood, he will definitely become a promising artist. Now Jamie is like a cancer, which makes his mother sad.

Edmond, the youngest son, has always been weak and occasionally gets sick with a cold. However, due to his father's meanness, he delayed the opportunity of treatment and developed into tuberculosis, which was regarded as an incurable disease at that time. The approach of death, coupled with the long-term influence of Schopenhauer and Wilde's pessimistic and decadent thoughts, made him a complete pessimist.

"I hope to get drunk all the time. This is the only possible thing. Everything else doesn't matter. If you don't want to shoulder the terrible burden of time and let it crush you into powder, get drunk … it's time to get drunk, get drunk! If I don't want to be a slave to time, then continue to get drunk! " "Life is like three gorgons in mythology, and anyone who sees them will turn to stone. Just like Pan Shen, it's a sheep's foot. Anyone who sees him will die ... although he still lives in the world, he is actually a walking corpse. " Edmond is Mary's new hope, but now it is like a spell on the Monkey King's head, which gives her a headache from time to time.

So, Mary, who tried to play the third role in life and become a good mother, finally collapsed completely, and she completely lost her direction on the way to find a home. From then on, Mary began to resent her husband for not giving her a decent home, and accused her son of ignorance, decadence and incompetence. His love-hate feelings tortured her. When the love she gave was not returned, Mary's maternity and gentleness were hidden bit by bit, and her wildness and hatred needed to be vented. So she began to avoid her family, anesthetized herself with morphine, supported her spirit with hallucinations, and gradually lost her value.

Mary kept repeating in a trance that something was missing. "I missed something important. I remember that I never felt lonely or afraid before I lost it. I can't lose it forever. If so, I would rather die, because there was no hope at that time. "

What did Mary lose? Obviously, what she said is the loss of self-esteem, value, comfort, support, affection, or more precisely, the feeling of home. She longed for the understanding, consideration and caress of her relatives, and he begged her husband not to leave her alone in that shameful home. She has nowhere to go and no friends to visit.

Unfortunately, Mary thinks that God abandoned her, and she can only rely on illusory dreams to wrap herself tightly in the fog to escape from reality. Because the fog can completely isolate her from the outside world, everything in the fog has changed and everything is different. But the annoying fog flute will always be around, pulling her back to reality.

Mary longs for the liberation of death, so do Jamie and Edmund? O 'Neill expressed their feelings through Edmund. "I came to this world to be an individual. This is a big mistake. As a person, I will always feel that I am an outsider and can't find a safe home. I don't need anything, nor am I needed by others. " Such a person will never find a home, and will always hold a trace of attachment to death.

I remember Nietzsche wrote in his "The Birth of Tragedy": "King Midas asked Silenus the elf: What is the most beautiful and wonderful thing for mankind? The genie replied: poor floating life, son of impermanence and suffering, the best things are beyond your reach. That is, it is not born, does not exist, and becomes nothing. But there is a second good thing-die immediately. " In a cold and hellish world, people are like walking dead, with nowhere to hide, and they can only passively accept everything that life gives them.

When the curtain rises slowly, the fate of the heroine Mary has been decided, and people can only resign themselves to fate. Mary is in such a tragedy, she is unfortunate, and life is always a setback for her. When O 'Neill presented the play to the audience, O 'Neill was telling us the anxiety and anguish of modern civilized people who were far away from their spiritual home with sympathy and tolerance. Although the play has gone through more than half a century, it is still worth pondering today!