Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992

The voice in this section is Peter Sellars, Director, Los Angeles Festival.Sellars, a man in the business of theater, draws attention yet again to the overlapping of the entertainment and information industries, and the inherent element of sensation that defined the entire Rodney King affair. Taking a high-minded approach, one appropriate to his calling, Sellars makes a running comparison between the riots and Eugene O’Neill’s great American tragedy, Long Day’s Journey into Night, in which a household is beset by the whims and weaknesses of a self-centered patriarch. The problem, Sellars insists, is “This isn’t somebody else’s house, it’s our own house. This is the city we are living in. It’s our house […] start a fire in the basement and, you know, nobody’s gonna be left on the top floor. It’s one house. And shutting the door in your room, it doesn’t matter” (200). Sellars depicts the failure of the American dream, along with the failure of people to realize it is a shared dream in which all rise or get “incinerated” together.

The title of this section refers to Eugene O’Neill’s great American tragedy, Long Day’s Journey into Night, “the classic play about the American dream” (200).