There’s a good reason why Jessica Lange is skipping out on another season of American Horror Story. She has to be on Broadway to star in a new production of Eugene O’Neill’s masterpiece Long Day’s Journey Into Night.
The Roundabout Theatre production will be staged in association with AHS co-creator Ryan Murphy, who has the stage rights to the play. Lange will be paired with Gabriel Byrne.
Lange will star as Mary, the drug-addicted matriarch of the Tyrone family, while Byrne will star as her husband, James. John Gallagher Jr. will play Edmund, but the other Tyrone son has not been cast yet.
According to The New York Times, the two-time Oscar winner hasn’t been seen on Broadway since 2005, when she starred in a production of The Glass Menagerie. In 2000, she starred in a London production of Long Day’s.
Byrne, who was recently seen in Vikings, also performed on the stage in a 2005 production of O’Neill’s A Touch of the Poet. He’s a Tony nominee for 2000’s A Moon for the Misbegotten.
Long Day’s is one of the great American plays and was famously turned into a film by Sidney Lumet in 1962, using the actual text of the play. O’Neill also won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for the play in 1957.
Jonathan Kent is directing the new production, which will be staged at the American Airlines Theatre. Previews start on March 31 and the opening is set for April 19.
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