Life In Four Acts
Trace Coles and Matthew Radford Davies share as scene as Edmund and James in Cadence’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” The play runs through Oct. 11 at the Firehouse Theatre. Photos by Jason Collins Photography
Originally published by Style Weekly
by Rich Griset
September 30, 2025
Eugene O’Neill’s magnum opus “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” storms the stage in Cadence’s new production.
For actor Matthew Radford Davies, the title of the play he’s currently starring in, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” has special resonance.
A resident of Staunton, Davies has been making three-and-a-half-hour, round-trip drives to attend three-and-a-half-hour rehearsals in Richmond for the past few weeks.
“I actually found it quite relaxing,” says the British actor and Mary Baldwin University Shakespeare professor. “On the way over you learn lines, and on the way back you think about what you need to do for the next rehearsal.”
Considered Eugene O’Neill’s magnum opus, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” concerns the Tyrones, a New England family contending with addiction and long simmering emotional wounds.
“It’s a family drama that takes place in one day,” explains Rusty Wilson, director of the Cadence production currently onstage at the Firehouse Theatre. “It’s about how a family that loves each other is splintered by addiction. For the men, it’s with alcohol. For the women, it’s with morphine, but addiction runs through the whole situation.”
Considered alongside Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” and Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire” as one of the great American plays of the past century, “A Long Day’s Journey Into Night” posthumously won O’Neill his fourth Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Other notable O’Neill works include “Beyond the Horizon,” “Anna Christie,” “Desire Under the Elms,” “Mourning Becomes Electra” and “The Iceman Cometh.”
Basing the Tyrones on his own family, O’Neill never wanted the play to be performed and left instructions that it was only to be published 25 years after his death. His widow, stage and film actress Carlotta Monterey, ignored his wishes and demanded that it be published right away. “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” was published in 1956, the same year its first live staging took place in Sweden.
In the Richmond production, Davies plays James Tyrone Sr., the family’s patriarch. A successful, retired actor, James feels that he wasted his talent in the pursuit of financial stability.
Trace Coles, Matthew Radford Davies, Robin Arthur and Axle Burtness as Edmund, James, Mary and Jamie.
“It’s a momentous part,” Davies says. “It’s a particularly difficult part for actors of a certain age because it’s about an actor of a certain age, and, therefore, if you are well-cast in the role, you have some similarities with the character that make you ask some fairly unpleasant questions about yourself.”
Axle Burtness, who plays the elder Tyrone son Jamie, says he identifies with his character’s family dynamics and familial addiction issues. Jamie is an actor like his father but has problems finding work because of his reputation as a womanizing and irresponsible alcoholic.
“I had a little bit of a personal feeling that I could bring to the show, of the desperation to connect with love,” Burtness says. “There is a lot of breaking Jamie down by other family members in one way or another, ultimately culminating in his scene at the end where he’s coming out of a drunken whirlwind, but all he’s doing is telling the truth.”
Trace Coles plays Edmund, the younger son whose biographical details mirror the playwright’s. Both O’Neill and the character attended a renowned university, spent years at sea, suffered from alcoholism and depression, and were admitted to a sanitorium for tuberculosis.
“I personally like to believe that Edmund is the most likeable, perhaps, for the audience,” says Coles of his character. “I feel like he is the one that holds onto hope the longest out of the family. It’s also interesting because he’s the youngest. He has empathy for everybody in the family, but he’s not afraid to put Momma, Poppa and his brother all in their place when they need to be.”
Wilson says the play is an exploration of what happens to a damaged family with the veil of civility is stripped away.
“It’s raw. It’s intimate,” Wilson says. “It’s dangerous and there’s nowhere to hide.”
Davies encourages people to see the show, noting how infrequently “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” gets staged.
“Very few people will be able to get to go on that journey with the Tyrones,” he says. “Come prepared to hike that mountain. If you do, you then will feel that rarified exhilaration, when you get to the top with the family, that you’ve been on that long day’s journey as well.
“It’s an uncompromising trip.”
Cadence’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” plays through Oct. 11 at the Firehouse Theatre, 1609 W. Broad St. For more information, call 804-233-4894.
