In collaboration with the Weston Playhouse, FOLA (Friends of Ludlow Auditorium) will present the award-winning drama, "Long Day's Journey into Night", on Saturday, August 19 at 7 PM in the Ludlow Town Hall Auditorium. The Weston Playhouse will feature the stage play from August 24 through September 3. Attendees to the movie version on August 19 will be able to purchase Weston Playhouse tickets with a $5 discount.

Long Day's Journey into Night is a 1962 adaptation of the Eugene O'Neill play. It was directed by Sidney Lumet and starred Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, Jason Robards, and Dean Stockwell. The screenplay was not adapted but used directly from O'Neill's play with the music score by André Previn.

Playwright Eugene O'Neill sold Random House the text of his intensely autobiographical 1941 play on the proviso that the play not be produced during O'Neill's lifetime. Two years after the playwright's death in 1953, the play was given its first Broadway staging and won a Pulitzer Prize.

The film concerns a fateful, heart-rending day in August 1912 at the seaside Connecticut home of the Tyrone family, the Great American Family at its worst. James Tyrone is an aging actor and skinflint whose miserliness has been the ruin of his family. His wife, Mary, has been a morphine addict since the birth of their youngest son, Edmund. Their eldest son, Jamie is an alcoholic, unable and unwilling to find work on his own, he has been 'forced' to take up his father's profession. Edmund, who has been away as a sailor has returned home sick and awaits the doctor's diagnosis of consumption. Each of them is so self-centered, and self-pitying, that they cannot help one-another. None of them even know what they want and they can't bear it.

Katharine Hepburn was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress. Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, Jason Robards and Dean Stockwell all won the Best Actor/Actress award at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival. The film was also nominated for the Palme d'Or.

The movie is open to everyone and is free; donations are appreciated. Popcorn will be supplied by Berkshire Bank with water provided by FOLA. For information, call (802) 228-7239 or visit the FOLA web site, www.fola.us.