Photo illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios. Photos: Charly Triballeau and Odd Andersen/AFP, and Erica Denhoff/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
(Marc Caputo’s article appeared on Axios, 10/14/2026.)
President Trump has directed his White House counsel to examine explosive allegations dropped on him Friday in the Oval Office:
Former Trump attorney Alina Habba told the president that another one of his top advisers — former Kennedy Center leader Ric Grenell — failed to deposit a multimillion-dollar donation that her billionaire husband made to the center a year ago, according to four senior administration officials and three insiders briefed on the controversy.
Grenell denied the accusations as “absurd” and a “lie.”
Habba and her husband, Turhan Mildon, declined to comment through a spokesperson.
Why it matters: The extraordinary row between the two top-tier presidential advisers and former allies provides a rare and acrimonious behind-the-scenes glimpse into the intersection of power, influence and money in Trump’s Washington.
The total value of the contribution in question: nearly $6 million, White House sources said Habba told them.
A senior administration official cautioned that “these are only allegations. We don’t know if they’re true. This could be a misunderstanding.”
Said another: “POTUS doesn’t want to deal with this. Of course, he’s concerned. But if there is missing money, this is a big, big problem.”
Just a few months ago, Grenell was friends with Mildon and Habba. But he was notably absent from their $10 million wedding that was attended by Trump world officials, power brokers and luminaries last month.
“This is the ultimate MAGA blood feud,” said one Trump world insider with knowledge of the conflict.
Zoom in: The dispute grew out of a friendship between Grenell and Mildon, sources familiar with the conflict say. The men had mutual interests in Venezuela in early 2025, immediately after Trump returned to the White House.
Grenell, as a Trump special envoy, was advocating for normalizing U.S. relations with Venezuela’s leader at the time, Nicolas Maduro.
Mildon, a Turkish national, had extensive Venezuelan business interests that were threatened by Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s hardline pressure campaign targeting Maduro.
The intrigue: In the spring of 2025, Grenell persuaded Mildon to include a multimillion-dollar Kennedy Center donation in a lump-sum $17.6 million payment for a business deal involving a U.S. company, Habba told the president and White House staffers, two sources said.
Habba’s attorneys plan to give the White House documentation — reviewed by Axios — to support her allegations about Grenell soliciting a Kennedy Center donation from Mildon to go to a private company in the spring of 2025.
“The White House counsel has asked for documents and proof. None has come so far,” a White House official said.
Grenell called the statements from Habba to Trump “Absurd. I’ve never asked for one cent to be sent somewhere else pretending it was for the Kennedy Center, and I’ve never received any payment from him at all. Make him give proof to what he is saying, not make these absurd allegations.”
When Habba initially leveled her accusations against Grenell, she said the total amount of the Kennedy Center contribution was $17 million, the sources said. But as she learned of the specifics from her husband, she said the amount of the contribution in question was $5.6 million.
“This has been hard to track because numbers have changed,” the White House official said.
After making his alleged contribution, Mildon never checked to see if it was deposited. He believed it had been credited because he was treated like a VIP donor at the Kennedy Center, where he met Habba in late 2025 before their whirlwind romance and marriage, those sources said.
Friction point: Mildon and Habba, the sources said, discovered the issue after their business relationship frayed with Grenell, who lost an internal administration power struggle with Rubio that culminated in the U.S. seizing Maduro on Jan. 3 and taking him to New York City to face narcotics charges.
In this episode of Entre Nous, Delano D’Souza speaks to Daisy Fancourt, professor at University College London and a leading researcher on how the arts affects our brains and bodies. In her book “Art Cure” she draws on scientific evidence to show how the arts can transform our health and what her research suggests we should be doing to optimise the benefits.
(Emma Loffhagen’s article appeared in the Guardian, 10/8/2026; Photo: TVP.)
World’s most prestigious prize for literature goes to Canadian poet known for genre-crossing works including Autobiography of Red
The Nobel prize in literature has been awarded to the Canadian poet and essayist Anne Carson, the Swedish Academy has announced.
The academy cited the author’s “bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature”.
Carson’s first book, Eros the Bittersweet, was published in 1986, and combined literary criticism with an exploration of desire and the ancient Greek tradition.
Her best-known work is Autobiography of Red, a 1998 novel in verse inspired by the fragments of the ancient Greek poet Stesichorus. It reimagines the myth of Geryon, the red-winged monster killed by Herakles, as the story of a modern teenage boy navigating heartbreak and desire.
In 2001, she became the first woman to win the TS Eliot prize for her collection The Beauty of the Husband. She has also been awarded Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships.
Her work has attracted praise from fellow writers, including Susan Sontag, who once said: “She is one of the few writers writing in English that I would read anything she wrote. If there’s a magazine that has something of hers in it, I buy it automatically.”
Carson’s books have ranged widely in form. Men in the Off Hours combined verse essays, poems, epitaphs and prose about artists and historical figures, and won the inaugural Griffin poetry prize in 2001. Decreation, another eclectic work, brought together poetry, essays and an opera. Nox, published in 2010, is particularly characteristic of Carson’s avante-garde approach to literature – the book takes the form of an accordion-fold box containing a reproduction of a notebook Carson made after the death of her brother. Her later works include Red Doc> and Float.
THEATER FOR THE NEW CITY’S VILLAGE HALLOWEEN COSTUME BALL TURNS 50WITH A NIGHT OF GHOULS, GLAMOUR AND THEATER.
Legendary Halloween tradition returns October 31 with performers including Austin Pendleton, aerial dance concert, live music, cabaret, $5 Witch’s Cauldron dinner (courtesy of neighborhood restaurants) and a midnight costume contest.
WHERE AND WHEN
October 31, 2026
“Village Halloween Costume Ball”
Presented by Theater for the New City, 155 First Ave. (at E. 10th Street)
NEW YORK — Fifty Halloweens after it began, Theater for the New City’s Village Halloween Costume Ball is still conjuring up the unexpected. On October 31, TNC will celebrate the 50th incarnation of its famously eccentric East Village tradition with an extravaganza of theater, music, dance, aerial performance, cabaret, food and flamboyant costumes. A large outdoor festivity will be held from 3:00 PM to 7:00 PM outside the Theater on East Tenth Street between First and Second Avenues (or if it rains, in a big tent), featuring performances and a costume competition for kids. The celebration moves inside into TNC’s four-theater complex from 7:00 PM to midnight . There will be nonstop performances (by Austin Pendleton and over 40 others), ballroom dancing (to Art Lillard’s Heavenly Swing Band and MisterPablo, a Latin Dance band), an aerial dance concert (by Caytha Jentin), and dining in a pop-up restaurant (The Witch’s Cauldron) where for $5, guests can savor a complete dinner donated by local restaurants. The evening culminates in a costume judging with prizes at midnight. Admission is free for the outdoor program and $20 for the indoor festivities. Costumes or formal wear are required.
On every Halloween since 1974, TNC has transformed its theater complex and surrounding streets into a carnival of the unexpected, where neighborhood families, artists, and revelers come together for an evening of spirited fun, live music, and avant-garde theater. This extravaganza has been a point of origin for many of the City’s most original entertainers. Six full-length plays have grown out of playlets written for the fest and it is probable that the theatrical movement in Performance Art began there. It has been a launching pad for such formative artists as Paul Zaloom, Alice Farley, Bloolips, The Red Mole, Penny Arcade, Basil Twist, Alien Comic Tom Murrin, Zero Boy, Charles Busch, Eduardo Machado, Moises Kaufman, Maria Irene Fornes and Phoebe Legere. Each year, many acts, skits, sketches, and skadoodles go on to become the basis of larger theater works.
The world-famous Village Halloween Parade began in 1974 as a production of Theater For The New City in collaboration with block associations of the West Village. The procession wound its way through the Village from TNC’s second home at the corner of Jane and West Streets to Washington Square Park. In the Parade’s second year, 1975, TNC won an Obie for the production. When organization of the parade was formally handed to the local block association in 1976, the event had forked into two parts: an informal parade of puppets for Greenwich Village children and a late-night dress-up ball for grownup villagers. Crystal Field wrote in 2001 in New York Theatre Wire, “We had planned to have a later night Ball for adults (Gretel Cummings’ idea, as I recall) — a Village Halloween Costume Ball– so that when the little ones slept, the adults could go dancing and partying in an indoor, more sophisticated set up. The ball has endured. We now serve a thousand to two thousand people with our four-theater ‘Village Halloween Costume Ball.'”
In 2020, due to the Covid shutdown, TNC maintained its Halloween tradition by presenting the entire event virtually. In 2021, it was mounted entirely outdoors. In 2022 TNC recaptured the event’s intensity and traditional magic by bringing it back inside. The decision was made to count 2020 as a “year uncounted” and to celebrate 2026 as the festival’s fiftieth incarnation.
TNC’S VILLAGE HALLOWEEN COSTUME BALL — Foreground: Crystal Field and Bina Sharif in costume judging at Theater for the New City’s Village Halloween Costume Ball, 2014. Photo by Jonathan Slaff.
SCHEDULE OF EVENTS (as of October 1)
PART 1 – OUTDOOR EVENTS
3:00 – 7:00 PM
ADMISSION FREE
Attractions will include:
Variety performances by Carol Tandava, Arley Trice, George Belleci, Joe Bendik, and musical group Star ’69.
Child Costume and others. Emceed by Mary Tierney.
Children’s Costume Contest judged by Crystal Field, T. Scott Lilly and Terry Lee King. Winners will receive prizes.
The Red and Black Masque: an annual Medieval ritual ensemble theater piece which is performed by torchlight with audience participation. (7:00)
At 7:00, the celebration goes inside the four-theater complex for food, fun, and exciting new theater works, culminating with a costume contest at 11:00 PM whose winners will each receive a bottle of Moet & Chandon Champagne and a year’s free pass to TNC.
PART 2 – INDOOR EVENTS
7:00 – 11:00
ADMISSION $20
CABARET PERFORMANCES (7:00 PM to 11:00 PM)
A succession of live, 10-minute performances staged in the Community Theater. Performing artists will be, among others: Austin Pendleton, Richard West, Yip Harburg Rainbow Troupe, Stephan Morrow, John Grimaldi, Carol Tandava (Belly Dance), Michael Christian, TNC Street Theater Enemble, Inma Heredia, Peter Dizzoza, Alessandra Belloni, Emilio Garcia, Asher Cohen (“Egg Eats Chicken”), JC Augustin, Fairy Tale Marionette and Wise Guise.
Scripted works by Toby Armor (directed by Joan Kane), Briana Bartenieff, New Yidddish Rep and Stefan Morrow, among many others.
Scream contest hosted by Didi Champagne. (9:30 PM)
Emceed by Melanie Maria Goodreaux.
BALLROOM DANCING:
Art Lillard’s Heavenly Big Band, a 17 piece swing orchestra performing an extensive repertoire of songs from swing to samba to jazz ballad to Bossa Nova with a swinging singing soloist (8:00 – 9:30)
Aerial Dance with Caytha Jentin, performing high over our heads in exciting new challenges to eye and ear (9:30 – 9:45)
Mr. Pablo’s Latin Dance Band, a five-piece fusion band with vocalist, mixing Salsa, Samba and Flamenco with Rock, Reggae and Funk (9:45 – 11:00)
DINING IN THE WITCHES’ CAULDRON
Downtown’s most sensational Halloween cafe, featuring a variety of American and international delicacies at peoples’ prices ($5 for a full dinner). Holiday dishes are contributed by neighboring East Village restaurants, some with celebrity chefs. You can gobble couscous from a coffin lid beginning at 7:00 pm while enjoying spine-tingling performances by performance artists, songwriters, poets and variety artists including: Mimi Block and Rome Neal, Smokey Stevens, Lei Zhou, Pamela Enz, Zero Boy, Sylvain Leroux, George Belleci, Marilyn Horan, Sarah Lilly, Ellen Steir, The Head Peddlers and Elliot Crown (7:00 – 11:00).
MONSTERS AND MIRACLES COSTUME PARADE
The annual costume contest hosted by Crystal Field. All costumed attendees are invited to march past a panel of celebrity judges. Winners receive one-year passes to TNC and a bottle of Moet & Chandon Champagne. Attendees will be judged in such categories as “Most Politically Relevant,” “Most Gluten Free,” “Most Uncompromised,” Most Non-AI,” “Most Visionary,” “Most Presidentially Honest,” “Most Oxygenated” and “Most Likely to be Extinct.” Judged by Melanie Maria Goodreaux, John Gilman, Sabura Rashid, Terry Lee King, Joe Battista, Crystal Field, Phillip Hackett and others.
VAUDEVILLE PERFORMANCES
Vaudeville in The Womb Room (Basement Cabaret Theater). Performers include Star ’69 (band), Larry Litt & Eleanor Heartley, WillieAnn Gissendanner, Sue Horowitz , New Yiddish Rep, Joe Bendik, Claude Solnik, Lei Zhou, Rocco Nicholas, Terry Lee King/ Billie Little and Danielle Aziza (8:00 – 10:00).
LOBBY EVENTS
Performances by Cobu (all-women Taiko drum group), Hellsouls, flute-playing goblin Kahley Mitchell, tap dance with Laraine Goodman and The Mad Tappers, Fish Pond (casting for giveaway gifts), Fortune Teller Penny Diora (free readings), Champagne Bar served over a coffin with a live vampire inside.
HALLOWEEN DECOR
Murals painted by Olga Castillo, Gilma Diaz, Sean Finnerty and many others.
(Juan A. Ramírez’s review appeared in the Guardian, 9/28.)
Nearly a decade after it was first staged, Jocelyn Bioh’s study of girlhood in 1980s Ghana is better than ever in irresistible new production
After its 2017 premiere off-Broadway, School Girls; Or, the African Mean Girls Play transferred to Los Angeles, was remounted in New York the following year, and has since been staged in over 75 theaters across the US, plus a successful run in London. It’s easy to see why – Jocelyn Bioh’s one-act comedy has a familiar structure, richly detailed characters, and an onslaught of delicious barbs. Plus it has the good sense of an 80-minute runtime.
Its splendid Broadway debut is not content with being a mere victory lap, though, in a freshly glorious production helmed by Whitney White. Having staged Bioh’s Tony-winning Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, the director knows her way around an all-women ensemble, and often counts upon a team of usual suspects to make her shows pop: Nikiya Mathis, who won a special Tony for Jaja’s hair and wig designs, and Qween Jean, whose costumes enlivened the Pulitzer-winning Liberation, ensure there’s always visual splendor onstage.
But Bioh’s play is the thing, tracing a Ghanaian all-girls school clique disperse and reassemble upon the arrival of an American transfer student in 1986. Before then, ringleader Paulina (Denée Benton) was certain she would be the school’s pick for the Miss Ghana beauty pageant, treating friends Ama, Gifty and Mercy (Lucia Aremu, Nia Otchere-Sarfo and Jordan Rice) like handmaidens and being particularly cruel to the plus-sized Nana (Erin Morton).
Enter new girl Ericka (Jasmine Amy Rogers), an instant hit at the school – charming, gorgeous and eager to please – and an instant threat to Paulina’s reign. This is where Bioh’s script becomes thornier: Ericka is far lighter-skinned than Paulina, which pageant recruiter Eloise (Patina Miller) makes clear gives her a “more universal and commercial” edge. Our rooting for the queen bee’s comeuppance is complicated by the reality of colorism. And, of course, capitalism is never far off, with the headmistress (Heather Alicia Simms) tempted to look the other way since the pageant would reward the understaffed school with a hefty cash prize.
School Girls is proudly not looking to reinvent the wheel, and there’s comfort in its straightforward machinations even as it explores its complex themes. Bioh has said that she dropped the notion that misery equals significance early in her writing career, yet her plays carry the sociocultural heft one imagines she had initially set out to showcase via unsmiling dramas.
As in Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, or the Lagos-set Nollywood Dreams, this is a comedy – full-stop – but one undergirded with deft specificity. School Girls respects its teens’ right to frivolous infighting, Bioh respects their particular situation’s challenges, and it’s in that combination that her plays become so salient. Bioh’s background as an actor also means she knows exactly how to craft lively dialogue and wonderfully individual characters, which White (a performer and playwright herself) is completely at home bringing to life with this knockout cast.
Miller and Simms are stage veterans with warm presences and a casual nobility perfectly suited to the adult roles. Aremu, Otchere-Sarfo and Rice create distinct (and distinctly funny) portraits of Paulina’s ostensible sidekicks, and Morton is empathy and willpower personified.
Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night has been filmed, to acclaim, multiple times, including Sidney Lumet’s 1962 production, which garnered Katharine Hepburn an Oscar nomination—and, at its culmination, left the cast immobile, like mice caught in glue. In 1973, Laurence Olivier’s version, won an Emmy for the actor’s portrayal of the father, James Tyrone, which was based on the 1971 National Theatre production. O’Neill had already won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936, but he never intended his original “play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood,” to be published, until twenty-five years after his death (he died in 1953). Never to be performed, he did make arrangements for the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm to stage it, even so. His widow, Carlotta, overriding alarum, approved the first staging of Long Day’s Journey into Night to take place in Sweden, in 1956.
Jonathan Kent’s new film is drawn from his 2016 Broadway revival, for which Jessica Lange won a Tony Award. The work, in a streamlined adaptation by Pulitzer-winning David Lindsay-Abaire, is shaped by and focused on Lange’s Mary Tyrone, a convent girl who becomes addicted to morphine, after the delivery of her last child. Some would disagree, though, that she is the leading character in the script, if the drama is examined in a more Aristotelian way (Aristotle, of course, did not write plays). The main role in O’Neill’s masterpiece probably belongs to the youngest son, Edmund (Colin Morgan), traveling to the doctor to confirm a diagnosis of TB.
The playwright might have felt he had earned his own way of seeing drama, as an unruly experimentalist, like James Joyce, who wrote too long, as well (O’Neill said he actually did cut his texts, however); Kent nods to this untameable, Irish instinct, when showing the help in the Tyrone kitchen (including the cook, Bridget, who is not seen in the play (Lesa Thurman). Did not Treplev, in Chekhov’s The Seagull (the Russian writer influenced O’Neill), call for New Forms?: “and if we can’t have them, then we’d better have nothing at all.” The great interpreter of O’Neill, Brian Dennehy, once explained, in a 2003 Theater Talk interview, as well, that the playwright felt the length, and repetition, of his work was needed–he wanted to “wear the audience down” in order to “saturate them with his ideas.”
The run-time for the new movie is 109 minutes (1 hour and 49 minutes). The show time for the Kent-Lange stage production was approximately 3 hours and 45 minutes (225 minutes). All other film records are longer than two hours and 30 minutes: The Hepburn film lasts 2 hours and 50 minutes; the Olivier version is 2 hours and 40 minutes. Jack Lemmon’s 1987 showing, directed by Jonathan Miller, runs 2 hours and 50 minutes. Ingmar Bergman’s 1988 stage version lasted approximately three hours, but was cut down from its original four-and-one-half hour stage length. The Dennehy production, also starring Vanessa Redgrave: 4.5 hours.
The current adaptation, given its relatively brief running time, with what could be considered at least 50 missing minutes, might be comparable to the brittle and delicate 35-year-old wedding bouquet, unpacked in the film, a keepsake, but not the wedding gown (I recall Bibi Andersson dropped hers and left it, forgotten, in Ingmar Bergman’s production).
Number of real American dead: from between 19 and 22, with over 820 wounded. Record Fuel Costs* (Drudge Report). Kitchen table up 1.2% (May-June). Mortgage rates rise. In the entertainment industry, healthcare benefits are being lost for unionized performers, who do not earn the $28,933 earning requirement to retain SAG-AFTRA health insurance plans.
Trends in Arts and technology are allowing films to be executed differently today, more efficiently than in, let’s say, Lumet’s Hollywood of 1962–even in 2007, before his death, improved methods ran Bergman out of the business.
O’Neill had become passé, in the East Village (1980s), after a 1972-1973 surge, with Colleen Dewhurst in A Moon for the Misbegotten. Other playwrights arrived, a new generation stormed the gates: Sam Shepard, Wendy Wasserstein, August Wilson, Christopher Durang, to name only four. When I mentioned O’Neill, one day in a class, I was greeted with silence. Irish-Americans might still feel that their own experiences were so uncannily his, or his were theirs, but in an ever-changing New York City, who, except us, could find episodes from 1912 relevant? Were they real or imagined, anyway, heard or literal, no matter how accurate: or were they all from a book?: The priests and nuns, churches and convent girls, bad doctors and orphans, bogs, and whiskey, pianos and famine, lack of responsibility, stubbornness and outside work, the seashore, God, circumvented fathers, Holy Mary, and “leopards whose spots don’t change.”
Kent and Lindsay-Abaire do seem to be mistaking O’Neill for Tennessee Williams, a late convert to Catholicism, born an Episcopalian, at the beginning of their Long Day’s Journey into Night, as if they’re starting to mount The Glass Menagerie (Tom and Edmund both go to sea). The team is forfeiting an amazing stream of naturalism, as if we’re listening from the next room, caught so well by David Wellington in his 1996 Canadian production, starring William Hutt and Martha Henry (run-time: 2 hrs. and 53 minutes).
In the early ‘90s, my new roommate, decades my senior, a proper, divorced stockbroker, who wore navy pin-striped suits and Brooks Brothers shirts—and had gone through a nasty, protracted divorce from “the dragon lady,” suddenly mentioned Eugene O’Neill. He thought one of the most memorable parts, from Long Day’s Journey into Night, was the light bulb scene. “Did you ever see it?”
The aforementioned sequence is handled swiftly, in the new film, in the dark, but both Ralph Richardson (in the Lumet version) and Olivier, actually unscrewed them, facing the burning, tactile electric heat, one by one.
My new roommate, I would find out, read biographies of Eugene O’Neill. It was an interest. He became an expert on the writer, as he saw his children less and less. What a strange coincidence–I was still dressing in all black (he suggested I change that to blue). Was our common literary interest based on identifying with creatures from the gloam? Or was emotional truth prevailing, penetrating–like drama was supposed to behave? The ridiculed, misunderstood James Tyrone (Ed Harris), O’Neill’s paterfamilias, may be critical to an understanding of the reality of the playscape, speaking to most people’s needs and lives, now. Our breaking shopping bags and mice in the dormant heater, during the summer humidity and coming nor’easter.
James is the character who knows, most intimately, the panic of financial insecurity, having been deserted by his father as a child and, by default, working to support his mother and four siblings for 50 cents a week. As breadwinner, he then took on the economic complexity of his own tormented life and family. In the play, the “Old Man” can afford his properties, for he became a successful thespian. His investments, however, are considered ill-advised by his wife and sons. He does pay for a cook, maid, and chauffeur/garbageman, even so (how many could do that now?). For those who have been poor, the internal panic may never end—and regarding Tyrone, in particular, Social Security, no matter how long it will last into our future, would never lessen his anxiety: it wasn’t even implemented until 1940.
I’ve never completely understood why Mary is left alone, during the afternoon of the day when Edmund and Jamie (Ben Foster) go to the doctor. They will hear Edmund’s diagnosis then (James, in the meantime, is looking after his business interests and has an appointment at the club, to follow-up at the doctor’s office, later). They’ve worried about Mary’s return from the hospital; she’s been “home” for two months, and, the previous night, she entered her old room where she habitually takes morphine. She’s emotionally fraught about the triggering news that her son may be terminally ill.
Why would they leave her—or why wouldn’t more precautions have been set in place? The family throws their hands up so easily; I don’t know whether it’s a plot hole or disturbing inner truth. Cathleen (Ericka Roe), the maid, is clueless—and useless. But wouldn’t one of the other domestic workers have filled her in?
I suppose the larger issue with the new Long Day’s Journey into Night is that it does not “fail better,” to quote Beckett. All the monumental productions, with famous actresses, shocking revelations, artistic imaginations and visions, and the new Aristotelian reflection does not inform our lives more meaningfully than what has gone before. An anomaly, it is. The line readings are done well, but this may be thought of, perhaps, as a tribute–not a primal haunting or rite. The pages of dialogue have been strategically edited to size. The cinematography (Mark Wolf) and lighting can be shimmering, the colors muted, but the way of life portrayed seems too dependent on current stereotypes and sensibilities–not the graver, more hardscrabble existence suggested by the accusations, confrontations, and self-destruction of the play, or even from faces in sepia-toned portraits, from the setting’s time. So much entertainment industry know-how, with the stuff of lived life, and everyday carry, largely beautified, sentimentalized, or missing (such a drop zone of detritus was actually highlighted in the Jessica Lange’ movie Country, 1984). O’Neill himself, the philosophically anarchistic, radical playwright, would have rebuffed this prestige-film operation–but, like the first Swedish production of Long Day’s Journey into Night, cooler heads prevail.
Long Day’s Journey into Night is unknowable, unfathomable, an Everest, worth reading long biographies about, in which it is analyzed and contextualized–while putting away money for next month’s alimony. Multiple exposures are warranted, at different venues in various productions; hours and hours of them. Fortunately, that will never change.
3 GG Baby Vegetable Medley: $5.01 Borax 20ML TEAM: $11.99 SWT POTATO ORIENTL: $4.60 NAB UNS PREM: $3.99 MSS AP DEO SP RE: $9.49 PIC SS Mousetrap: $5.99 PEPSODENT TPASTE: $2.29
Mary’s shattering last monologue is, perhaps, what people remember most vividly, when they conjure recollections of the play’s emotional excavations, or the dark admittance of sibling betrayal between the brothers. The story goes that after the first night of the American production, on February 7, 1956, the audience wouldn’t leave. They came up to the stage and stood there transfixed, wanting to be near it still; they had been so moved.
Mary, you may know, beat her morphine addiction after her husband’s death. Never conclusively diagnosed, Eugene (Edmund), was unable to write for the last ten years of his life, due to a progressive neurological disorder, marked by severe tremoring of the hands. Jamie, taking care of his mother, until her death at age 64, in L.A., rode with her body back to the East Coast, by train, boozing it up with whores.
(c) by Bob Shuman. All rights reserved.
CREDITS
IN MEMORY OF Bill Kenwright
CAST (In order of appearance) Mary Tyrone JESSICA LANGE James Tyrone ED HARRIS Jamie Tyrone BEN FOSTER Edmund Tyrone COLIN MORGAN Cathleen ERICKA ROE Bridget LESA THURMAN Captain Turner BRENT HEARNE Smythe DEREK CARROLL
Stunt Coordinator DONAL O’FARRELL Stunt Double WILL WILLOUGHBY
Financial Consultant LUKE RANDOLPH
Associate Producer EMILY LOWE
First Assistant Director DOMINIC CHANNING WILLIAMS
Production Manager BERNIE MCGRATH
Production Sound Mixer ROB FLANAGAN
Supervising Art Director MARK LOWRY
Additional Photography MIKE ELEY BSC
Script Supervisor SUSANNA LENTON
Dialect Coach ERIK SINGER
Sound Supervisor DANNY SHEEHAN
Re-recording Mixer PAUL COTTERELL
Post Production Supervisor MEG CLARK
First Assistant Editor RUTH ANTOINE
Casting Director (Ireland) MAUREEN HUGHES
A Camera Operator MARK WOLF BSC A Camera First Assistants JOHN MCCARTHY OLIVER DRISCOLL
Starring two-time Academy Award®-winner Jessica Lange reprising her 2016 Tony-Award® winning Broadway role for the big screen of the famed Pulitzer Prize winning play by Eugene O’Neill,Academy Award®-nominee Ed Harris, Ben Foster and Colin Morgan
The film is the directorial debut of celebrated British theater and opera director, Jonathan Kent, who has stepped behind the camera for the first time to direct his much-anticipated screen adaptation of O’Neill’s play. Jessica Lange brilliantly plays the emotionally troubled, and addiction-plagued matriarch Mary Tyrone. Ed Harris co-stars as her husband James, self-made man, renowned actor, and failed property magnate. The Tyrone family is completed by Ben Foster as the charming, but wayward and hard-drinking elder son, Jamie, with Colin Morgan as the poetic, bleakly optimistic and consumptive younger son, Edmund – a portrait of O’Neill himself.
LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT SYNOPSIS:
Set on one single day in August 1912 at the family’s Connecticut seaside home, the story follows the Tyrone family as it faces the looming dual specters of Edmund’s potentially fatal consumption diagnosis alongside his mother Mary’s increasingly fragile and anxious state of mind. The family knows that the situation threatens to return her to the severe morphine addiction that was only recently overcome.
Opening in Los Angeles September 25, 2026, Additional Markets To Be Announced Shortly
(Michael Billington’s article appeared in the Guardian, 9/23/26. A remarkable gift for dialogue … Shelagh Delaney pictured in 1960. Photograph: Tom Stuttard/the Guardian.)
‘The playwright’s daughter found Catch Me Who Can after her mother’s death. Now it has become a compelling audio drama with Toby Jones and Rita Tushingham
Was Shelagh Delaney a one-hit wonder? Absolutely not. Aside from A Taste of Honey which, in the words of Dominic Dromgoole, “has a rock-solid heart and the gleam of the natural”, she wrote the screenplays for the films Charlie Bubbles and Dance With a Stranger, TV series including The House That Jack Built and several radio plays. But now a 30-minute piece, Catch Me Who Can, has come to light, been released as an audio drama and turns out to be a little gem.
Its origins are fascinating. It deals with a teenage truant and was discovered by Delaney’s daughter, Charlotte, after her mother’s death in 2011. But why did it lay hidden for so long? According to Charlotte, who has adapted it for audio: “It imagines my last few hours on the lam having run away from home and school when I was 14 in 1978. I was gone for three days and two nights. I’d suggest it’s a racing certainty that the reason nothing has ever been heard of it is that it’s about me and my mum had rules about that kind of thing.”
The bulk of the play consists of a testy confrontation between the runaway Hattie (Ivy Sheehan) and her maths teacher (Toby Jones) who tries to persuade her to return home. Although the teacher is only out jogging in a park because he is on strike, he stands for a world of order, discipline and control; Hattie, on the other hand, embodies the need for freedom, anarchy and self-expression. But Delaney imbues the situation with its own ironies. The teacher argues for the sanctity of family life but is himself a conspicuous loner; Hattie’s urge for self-discovery conceals a total disregard for other people including her anxious parents.
Rita Tushingham, far left, with Robert Stephens, Murray Melvin and Dora Bryan in the 1961 film version of A Taste of Honey. Photograph: Ronald Grant
Several things make the play worth listening to. One is the ease and naturalness of the dialogue. Hattie, not unlike the teenage Jo in A Taste of Honey, asks endless questions. At one point she taxes the teacher as to whether he ever did anything to find out what it was like just for the sake of it since “you once told us curiosity was divine”. Delaney also introduces an itinerant bag lady – played by none other than Rita Tushingham who was Jo in Tony Richardson’s film of A Taste of Honey – who says of a relative: “They took him into hospital and took his leg off – just like President Tito.”
At 22, Paraguayan actor, writer and emerging director Enzo Szarán is developing his own theatrical language. His work explores tragedy, German philosophy and human passions. On 23 September, 2026, Szarán presents Sobre una cama de rosas (On a bed of roses) at the Teatro Municipal Ignacio A. Pane. A production that merges theatre, music, dance and visual arts.
Finding his artistic voice
Growing up surrounded by artists gives Szarán an early connection with the creative world. However, his artistic direction becomes clearer during his teenage years. At 15, a scholarship allows him to study theatre with master Agustín Aletto.
“When I travelled to Buenos Aires for a scholarship, I studied with the master Agustín Aletto. That changed my life,” Szarán tells The Asunción Times. “It changed the way I saw things and especially art.”
Until then, his interests centre on comics and comedy. However, discovering tragedy through Romeo and Juliet changes his artistic perspective. “I used to do a lot of comic books, a lot of comedy. Then I saw Romeo and Juliet and the movies. I understood that tragedy was what I liked.”
Since then, tragedy remains central to his creative identity. “Everything I write is tragic, dramatic or melodramatic,” he explains. Alongside tragedy, German philosophy and theatre shape his artistic approach. In particular, Bertolt Brecht and Friedrich Nietzsche influence how he understands theatre.
Enzo Szarán’s writing through music
For Szarán, the creative process begins with classical music. Before writing, he listens repeatedly until an emotional connection develops. “First I listen to classical music for a long time. When the music connects with the words I want to say, I start writing.”
From there, his process becomes detailed and methodical. He writes, listens and analyses each section before continuing. Consequently, music becomes more than background inspiration. Instead, it helps him find the emotions and words behind each scene.
Above all, Szarán wants audiences to think about what they see. His theatre therefore seeks reflection alongside emotion. “What I look for is that people think and reflect, especially about the themes in the work. That is why I use Brecht’s language in my works. I would like people to think more and reflect more on the themes present in society.”
Bringing Sobre una cama de rosas to the stage
These ideas now come together in Sobre una cama de rosas, his newest production. The story grows from his experiences as a writer and actor. Meanwhile, the play introduces a fictional religion inspired by the New Testament.
“I always wanted to create a religious work, but not a real religious work. I wanted a fictitious religion.”
From that idea, Enzo Szarán builds a larger fictional universe. The production also becomes an opportunity for young performers entering the arts. “This new work was created to encourage young people, especially those starting in this art.”
For Szarán, however, the project involves more than creating opportunities. Building a strong relationship between performers also remains essential. “Theatre is pure connection. You build a bond within the cast and create an art that requires a lot of thought.”
As a result, collaboration becomes part of the production’s creative process. The cast works together to communicate the ideas behind the story.
A different theatrical experience
On 23 September, Sobre una cama de rosas premieres at the Teatro Municipal Ignacio A. Pane. The performance begins at 20:00 and lasts approximately one hour. For audiences, Szarán promises an experience that moves beyond conventional theatre. The production mixes theatre, music, dance and visual arts through the concept of “total theatre”.
This past week, a herd of 40 buffalo roamed the concrete canyons of Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn – life-size puppets that are part of a public arts project by St. Ann’s Warehouse, a Brooklyn theater. Correspondent Anthony Mason reports. “CBS News Sunday Morning” features stories on the arts, music, nature, entertainment, sports, history, science and Americana, and highlights unique human accomplishments and achievements. Check local listings for “CBS News Sunday Morning” broadcast times.
In this episode of Entre Nous, Delano D’Souza speaks to Daisy Fancourt, professor at University College London and a leading researcher on how the arts affects our brains and bodies. In her book “Art Cure” she draws on scientific evidence to show how the arts can transform our health and what her research suggests we should be doing to optimise the benefits.
