Viewpoints

By Gerald Clarke

LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT by Eugene O'Neill. ABC. Saturday, March 10, 8-11 p.m. E.S.T.

It is odd that the first U.S. television production of America's greatest play comes from England, but even the most rabid "Buy-American" fanatic can welcome this import from Britain's National Theater. It may well be the most interesting Long Day's Journey since the original New York production in 1956.

He wrote the play, Eugene O'Neill said, with pity, understanding and forgiveness for "all the four haunted Tyrones," the name he used for his own family. In most productions of the play, James Tyrone, the father, a former matinee idol, dominates like some whirlpool of possessive energy and emotion that swallows everyone around him. Laurence Olivier captures the power, but he also shows the old man's vulnerability, his tenderness and, most of all, his pain and guilt as he watches his wife Mary retreat once again into the fogs of drug addiction.

Mary's retreat--which is a flight into the past as well--provides the structural unity of the play. Constance Cummings makes her long day's journey not only believable but, in a sense, necessary. With remnants of beauty, she is still the coquette James Tyrone once fell in love with, as well as the too-loving mother of his sons. If Olivier shows Tyrone's softness as well as his hardness, Cummings shows Mary's hardness as well as her softness--and the desperation that puts her need for drugs ahead of her love for her family.

As the two sons, Denis Quilley and Ronald Pickup are more than adequate but, by comparison with Olivier and Cummings, less than satisfying. Quilley lacks Jamie's brass as a kind of Broadway bounder; Pickup fails to capture the boyish, romantic openness of the 23-year-old Edmund, O'Neill's image of his youthful self. Still, both succeed in expressing some of the play's sorrow and outrage at life's pattern of betrayal. "None of us can help the things life has done to us," Mary says at one point. "They're done before you realize it, and once they're done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you'd like to be, and you've lost your true self forever."

STICKS AND BONES by David Rabe. CBS. Friday, March 9, 9-11 p.m. E.S.T.

The greatest national trauma since the Civil War, the U.S. involvement in Viet Nam, has yet to be exorcised in drama or fiction. One early attempt is Sticks and Bones. Last year's Tony Award winner on Broadway, it is a har rowing play that probes the country's unaccepted guilt and pain.

A blinded combat veteran (Cliff DeYoung) returns home to the proto typical family of TV sitcoms. The fa ther (Tom Aldredge) is glued to foot ball on the tube. The mother (Anne Jackson) busies herself waiting on her husband and their younger son (Alan Cauldwell), who serves as a kind of bucktoothed Greek chorus of one. To ease the pain of memory, the veteran is force-fed cliches, sleeping pills and a refrigerator full of fudge, milk and soda pop. When none of their remedies works, he is offered the only other solution the family knows --suicide-- and put out on the curb with all the other garbage.

It is strong stuff for commercial TV, stronger even than it seemed on the New York stage. Judicious pruning and re writing have sharpened Playwright Rabe's savage satire, while the TV for mat has liberated the play from a living-room set, showing that the family is sur rounded by a whole world of other equally banal --and equally murderous-- families.

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