‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night’ Cadence Brings One of America’s Greatest Plays to Richmond

Originally published by RVA Magazine
by RVA Staff
September 22, 2025

Cadence Theatre is staging Long Day’s Journey Into Night at Firehouse Theatre from September 26 through October 11, 2025. Hailed as one of the greatest American plays of the 20th century, it untangles the knots of family, addiction, love, and regret across the span of a single summer day.

Eugene O’Neill, America’s first Nobel Prize winning playwright and a four-time Pulitzer recipient, wrote Long Day’s Journey Into Night in the early 1940s but sealed it away until after his death. Perhaps he knew it was too raw. Perhaps he couldn’t face audiences pointing and saying, “That’s his father,” or “That’s his mother,” or worse, “That’s him.” Today it is regarded as his magnum opus, towering even among a career of works that forever changed American theatre.

The story is, at its core, semi-autobiographical. O’Neill’s father was an Irish immigrant actor who spent his career typecast in a single role, his mother a morphine addict since Eugene’s difficult birth. O’Neill himself nearly died of tuberculosis in 1912, the same year he attempted suicide in a New York boarding house. His recovery in a sanatorium became his “rebirth,” the moment he decided, “I want to be an artist or nothing.” It’s no accident that the play is set in 1912 at the Tyrones’ summer home, where illness, addiction, and denial seep into every corner of the house.

In Richmond, the Tyrones will be brought to life by Matt Radford Davies as James Tyrone Sr., Robin Arthur as Mary Tyrone, Axle Burtness as Jamie Tyrone, Trace Coles as Edmund Tyrone, and Ruby Joy Garcia as Cathleen, under the direction of Rusty Wilson. For Wilson, this production is deeply personal: he first encountered the play as a teenager with his father. “I was shattered and somehow, affirmed,” he recalls. “It helped me identify and navigate my own family trauma in ways I wouldn’t have been able to understand without that mirror.” That experience set him on the path to theatre. Now, decades later, he returns to O’Neill with Cadence, staging the play as both a personal reckoning and a civic conversation.

As Wilson told Cadence in a preview story by Liv Wilson, the play is both timely and timeless: “Through the specific lens of the family Tyrone, we are asked to consider universal challenges including addiction, faith, forgiveness, blame, and abuse in a variety of forms. It’s universally relevant and especially so in Richmond right now.” Actor Matt Radford Davies added that, despite all the vitriol, “love seeps through the pores of every scene, every furious exchange, every downed tumbler of whiskey.” For him, the play’s themes of belonging and alienation echo the immigrant struggles of the early 20th century and still resonate in today’s culturally fluid America.

The production design leans into memory and haunting. Scenic designer Daniel Allen describes the play as a ghost story with faded wood, worn furniture, and a stage that places the audience as voyeurs, peering into a family’s private life through a window they would not otherwise be allowed to open. Costume designer Nancy Coles mirrors the characters’ decline through clothing that grows untidy and unchanged, reflecting how trapped they are in their habits. Even in the weight of the story, the cast finds lightness. “Samuel Beckett liked to say, ‘There’s nothing funnier than unhappiness,’” Radford Davies noted in Wilson’s piece. “The tougher the play, the more joyous and laughter-filled the rehearsal room. The cast bonds like climbers on a harsh mountain.”

This isn’t a period piece, it’s a reminder that the struggles we whisper about at kitchen tables today aren’t new. By staging Long Day’s Journey Into Night in 2025, Cadence is asking Richmond audiences to sit with discomfort, to recognize the echoes of their own lives, and to see theatre not as escape but confrontation. It’s a play about reckoning and one we are interested in seeing.

Yes, it’s long, nearly four hours, two intermissions, but O’Neill never promised comfort. What he delivered instead was theatre that still feels uncomfortably close to home. The Tyrones may be a century removed, but their ghosts are ours too.

This production is dedicated to Carol Piersol, the late Founding Artistic Director of Firehouse, whose vision shaped the stage where it will be performed.

On Sunday, September 28, audiences are invited to a post-show talkback with Wilson, the cast, and theatre scholar Christopher Corts. As part of artoberVA 2025, Cadence will also host a pay-what-you-will performance on Thursday, October 2.

Tickets are available now at Firehouse Theatre HERE