Tragedy 4 Acts
New York 1956
In Connecticut in 1912, James Tyrone, a rich semi-retired actor, rules his family with a combination of extreme miserliness and grandiose self-obsession. These qualities have so undermined his wife Mary's sense of worth that she is gripped by a deepening neurosis along with alcoholism, both of which James simply ignores.
Jamie, their eldest son, is also sliding into a drink problem, and he becomes ever more resentful of his father's insensitivity. His younger brother Edmund, who has just come back after years at sea, is clearly dying of consumption, but their father is too proud to accept Edmund's condition and too mean to send him to a proper sanatorium, thus provoking Jamie to even further bouts of drunkenness.
James regards each new demonstration of Edmund's worsening condition with blithe disbelief, until Mary finally declines into total madness.
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