New Play in Manhattan

Long Day's Journey into Night, Eugene O'Neill's unsparing levy on his own darkened past, may constitute his most substantial legacy to the American stage. Reaching Broadway 16 years after it was finished and three years after his death, this relentless chronicle of O'Neill's riven and tormented family has the imperious thrust of unblushing theater mated to unsoftened truth. It also achieves the illumination born of compulsive groping, prodding and clawing in dark places. In it O'Neill has managed to apply a famous phrase of Addison's--to ride in the whirlwind yet direct the storm.

The nearly four-hour-long play about the Tyrone family--actually the young O'Neill, his father, mother and elder brother--occupies a single day in 1912. The touchy, hard-drinking father--a gifted actor who had let himself dwindle into a successful matinee idol--is a miser.

His parsimonious use of cheap, irresponsible quacks has helped make the mother a hopeless dope fiend. The elder brother is a cynical and shiftless lush, the 23-year-old O'Neill an unconfident and consumptive fledgling writer. Nothing happens: four people merely taunt and bludgeon and resent one another while slowly, and at length explosively, revealing themselves. The play's movement is not forward, but downward and inward. In bedeviling propinquity, the drunken and the drugged exhibit spectral moments of love and convulsive moments of guilt, make accusations that are in effect confessions, go in for cruelties that are spewings of self-hate. Endlessly they go on saying the same things, while yet blurting out things not meant to be said at all; over and over they assume the same perverse or posturing roles, while betraying some corner of their actual selves.

Though the plotless play is overlong and sometimes cumbrous and clumsy, these weaknesses--as not often in O'Neill --have their value. The repetitions, for example, are in character, as coming from broken-willed people with a neurotic need for the solace or savagery of words. The plotlessness is the measure of their impotence. The play's language--merely straightforward and blunt, except where the self-dramatizing old actor and the word-conscious young writer empurple it --has in the theater far more trenchancy than the half-poetized prose so frequent in O'Neill. Even the lengthiness weights and certifies a story that, if told concisely, could merely seem lurid.

Long Day's Journey does not seem lurid. If only through writing about the family nightmare could O'Neill expunge it from his mind, then by waiting half a lifetime before he wrote, he achieved a strange but sure perspective. The play suggests a kind of emotional total recall rather than subjective involvement; in the most personal of his plays O'Neill seems, as a writer, least selfconscious. He has succeeded, not--as is usual in creative autobiography--through assuming some kind of mask, but through stripping himself bare. Memory has had for O'Neill an incandescence that imagination seldom did.

And understandably, for on his own doorstep he was to find characters more vibrant than any he could easily invent. The mother in Long Day's Journey has perhaps passed too directly from sheltered girl to shattered ghost, but the O'Neill men, with their still-far-from-extinct volcanic fires, their bitter humor, their biting anger, are flaringly Irish and fiercely damned. In the portrait of the father, O'Neill comes close to O'Casey. And in the scene between father and son (antedating similar scenes in Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams) and between brother and brother, what had once been flesh and blood is turned into blood and guts.

As staged by Jose Quintero, the production does justice to the play. Florence Eldridge as the mother, Jason Robards Jr. as the elder brother and Bradford Dillman as the young O'Neill are all good, and Fredric March as the father is superb. Such acting is needed for a play whose compassion lies in the completeness of its picture, the full plumbing of its characters. Nowhere are the characters softened into victims or flattened into villains; they remain--with however wayward or mocking an autonomy--people.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.