The Theater: Doom Music

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On June 21, 1939, Carlotta Monterey O'Neill, third wife of Eugene O'Neill, made the following diary entry: "A hot, sleepless night. Gene talks to me for hours—about a play (in his mind) of his mother, father, his brother and himself." That play was to be Long Day's Journey Into Night, the greatest drama ever written by an American. Apart from its power, honesty, wisdom, passion and compassion, the play is a notable example of how an act of personal exorcism—"to face my dead," as O'Neill put it—can emerge as an enduring work of art.

In an off-Broadway revival, the play is now being done with loving care, solid characterization, highly skillful acting and a melancholy sense of life's fatalities. O'Neill in this work strictly observed the Greek unities of time, place and action, and came closest to his lifelong aim of writing a neo-Greek tragedy. The story begins at breakfast time in New London, Conn., in 1912 and ends around midnight of the same day. The "four haunted Tyrones," as O'Neill renamed his family, establish a tension of rage and apology, followed by purgation in four self-revelatory monologues.

Dense Reality. Because of the casting of the two principal roles, James and Mary Tyrone, the play has a different focus than the original 1956 production. It might be argued that the change somewhat distorts O'Neill's intent. James (Robert Ryan) has toured the country for decades in a melodramatic potboiler, just as O'Neill's father did in The Count of Monte Cristo. Edwin Booth had once praised James' Othello, and he is haunted by the self-betrayal of his gifts. Ryan never quite suggests the commanding matinee-idol presence that Fredric March brought to the role.

On the other hand, Geraldine Fitzgerald gives a far denser reality to the role of the morphine-addicted wife than Florence Eldridge did. Eldridge seemed more absent-minded and scatterbrained than deeply disturbed and confused. Fitzgerald is the shy convent girl, the impish coquette and the victim of the lonely despair of a thousand one-night stands spent in second-rate hotels. She blends these elements into a consummately poignant portrait of a woman for whom drugs are the only surcease from sorrow. She, rather than the father, seems to dominate the play.

As the drunken older brother, James Jr., Stacy Keach lacks something of Jason Robards' Broadwayish flamboyance but inflects the role with more guilt-racked anguish. James Naughton has the same difficulty that Bradford Dillman had in the original in suggesting the steely resolve that the tubercular young Edmund (really Eugene O'Neill himself) must have possessed to wrest his genius from these stricken souls.