Joseph Papagjoni, dramaturg / theatre critic - Desperate faces from fate

Desperate people badly stuck in the grips of fate. The fate that gives with one hand and takes with the other. A family in the whirlwind of love and hate, where concern remains at the bottom as sea salt dried on a rock by the sun that burns, and in the impossibility of the solution they drink, get drunk and do drugs. Man and woman, squirming between yesterday and today, today and tomorrow, sweet nostalgia and anxiety, willingness and reluctance, acceptance and rejection. Brothers siblings sitting together to the swing of fatality, slow fading, emptiness, meaninglessness, lack of purpose, fear, failure, incompetence and vanity; where the ones star is likely to shine strongly, but the black space of the other one wiping it. To love and to hate, to accept and reject, being and not being, with money or without money, with work or with filth, with love or harlotry. With death near as an open grave and the disease, lengthen and the inevitable pang. All this human horror, this suffering, the guilt in the innocence, the wheel of fortune that gives people good and evil comes thanks to the excellent text of "Long Day's Journey Into Night" from Eugene O'Neill, the famous American playwright of 20th century. A heavy human drama which demand a spirit to face it and a sober mind to reason. A drama where the man is “naked”, the garments of "goodness" are thrown away, but however the kindness and the forgiving spirit are exactly right there; because the man remains like this in the light-shadow; because the generations are like this in the swing of negation-affirmation; because love is just the way it was and such will be, between ecstasy and contempt, beauty and deformity; because life itself is like the waves of the sea, once up and once down, to take you away and to smash you by the rocks as a moss, therefore you take from her serious injuries, you get hurt, you get mad and die. As the proverb says, “When evil comes, you should open the door”...

The play "Long Day's Journey Into Night" of the National Theatre of Albania was directed by Spiro Duni. His concept, in the point of view of image and establishment of actors, namely of the staging, was simple. Three acting areas, some chairs and a bench, a scale that descends from the top-down and the actors come and go from an acting area to another one. From this point of view, so of the image, is a minimalist directing. But, this was not important for the integrity of the show and its success. There was not any temptation for "metaphors" and staging which carry hidden and intermediate meanings. Absolutely no! It was something ordinary in appearance, a family environment and that’s it. But, why attracts us the play, keeps us silent and stuck behind the seat? Because it is the typology of "theater play" where the text is primer; where the character of a personage is disperse in deep psychological planes and not in the acting and directing speculation over this character; where the spoken word is pretty well conveyed to the spectator, in the appropriate logical, emotional, innovative and rhythmic dimensions, like a swelling with ups and downs, where beyond the peace and calm, we distinguishes the explosion and the disturbance, where behind the ordinary seem to be the extraordinary, where together with the sober and the pure is the turbulent and the brutal. Here lays, in my opinion, the value of the acting and directing work. It can be said that is something "traditional", "classic", "old class". But, why cannot be like this and when the pleasure you ask for comes, the shocked souls appear?! Spiro Duni didn’t want to make “furore", to yowl and gesture, but he has brought O'Neill’s text smoothly, under a human sadness and sorrow. There, the reliable of acting art is transformed in to the truth of human life of characters that explores and reveals the play.

The chortles, the explosions, the contingencies, this is the second aspect that I would like to highlight in the course of this play, in the sense of sudden tempo-rhythmic changes that experience the staged dialogue, when from the calm and the reasonable, from the normal flow and argumentative character is passed to its own objections. And then, deep down you see the souls who suffer, shake and are terrified of death, of failure, of the impossible, of glut, of anger, from every rage, open and covered from years, by "eating" the repentance and the nostalgia transformed into a sad grief.

The selection of the play, the play itself as such, is the premise of its success. I state: This is the actors play. Tyrone played by Artan Imami, is the captain and also the passenger of that kayak in a storm: of his family. He is not a Christ to assuage the troubled sea, he has not that power, he never had it, although his whole life has been a sailing between waves, and he, as captain of the sunken ship, expects for the "Eschaton" of his family (doomsday). The actor has a rare voice, ringing, where every word steers gently in our ear. An incomparable quality of acting. But Imami, apparently by the time, the experience and the age, has now become a good host of the word and of the emotion; he knows how to transmit it to the public, and how to embed it firmly in the hearts of the spectators. Being fluent, reasonable, mostly mild, when the soul falls into the kink by the accusation or misunderstandings of the children, he explodes and reveals a troubled psyche, between contradiction, a spirit that has been badly faced in life, having suffered from poverty and immigrant youth, who has “struggled” with fate, that felt in love and raised a family, that has created a welfare, but on the other hand, which is badly stalled after the austerity, the greed, which fear the future and that his children have escaped out of the hands because of bad lack and of his inability as a parent. This entire attempt has been managed by the actor with limited tools but very artistic ones. From the most beautiful moments that remained in mind is that spiritual twinkle in dialogue with his son, ..., when talking about childhood, life, sacrifices and trouble that have accompanied them. Although tired and full of resentment towards his children, although a parent not proud of them, he knows how to forgive, he knows how to understand and he knows how to be self-contained and to love immensely as injured father. It is a father where everyone can find a little itself.

Yllka Mujo, this actress who has a lifetime in the theater and all her life for the theater, I feel like I have nothing to say about her in the role of Mary but: Honored artist, your interpretation spared us so much pleasure! We saw in your soul and body a suffering mother. We saw the human pain which lead to the most sacred thing in theater: our cleaning as spectators from evil, from the poor, from the impossibility of reasoning and from logic weakening. And we come to regret, to mercy for the other, this moral structure designed from the ancient Greeks inventors of the tragedy, and transformed to an institution and human gesture by the religion. Your interpretation gave us the deep concern of a mother with an unbearable pain; which has lost a child, and to overcome the boundless despair she brings to life another baby immediately afterwards, perhaps as rescue or as happiness. You move in different directions, where the suppressed memories, the hiding of the disease to not worry the others, the loss of mental clarity, the loneliness exhausting along with deep sadness, are feelings of a mother and woman that excite deeply. The boy became the disaster of this mother, as unhealthy as it is, an open tomb at home. Unable to overcome the despair, she is drugged by doctors, who already benefit from the misfortune of patients.

Gent Deçka a young actor, which played the role of ill son James, the misfortune of which has broken the opportunity to be somebody, to become somebody with the gifts he has. It is a faded star. The dialogue with his father when he speaks of his concern, illness, doubts that afflict him and the impossibility of recovery, is one of the strong and dramatic moments, where the actor has brought a range of colors, thanks to a well controlled explosion. Also the actor Lulzim Zeqja is part of this trauma which has badly stuck this family, when brother against brother reveals the shocking secrets, alleged sensitivity sleeping within human nature such as envy, unhealthy ego, inferiority complex that becomes evil and rudeness, and on the other hand a soul which suffer failure, but also the love for his brother is stirred and strong.