Not Revival, But Rediscovery Long Day's Journey into Night by Eugene O'Neill

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Perhaps the worst thing that can happen to a play is to become revered. Directors and actors fear to alter any detail of the approach taken by their forerunners, above all to find revitalizing energy or laughter. This static worship typically kills a spectator's pleasure and misrepresents the author: Ibsen, Chekhov and Beckett wrote comedies, albeit sour or brooding ones, yet the works are often presented on so grim and sterile a landscape that the suicide of a major character seems a natural response, not a sickening climax. Much the same thing has happened to Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night. Its family portrait has so long been presented as unrelieved agony that endowing the characters with humor, affection and tenacity is a departure comparable to translating the Roman Catholic Mass from Latin into English--and just as demystifying.

The magnificent Broadway revival that opened last week features memorable performances by Jack Lemmon, Bethel Leslie, Kevin Spacey and especially Peter Gallagher, who is brilliant as the youth O'Neill based on himself, with the soul although not yet the articulation of a poet. But the guiding genius is British Director Jonathan Miller, who has not so much restaged as rediscovered the text. Miller relies on two simple yet profound realizations. First, family members do not politely listen to each other's stately speeches. They interrupt, contradict, mimic, mock, carry on cross-purpose conversation. They quarrel not like debaters but like boxers, wading into one another's rhythms. Thus, in this sped-up version, speeches overlap, much dialogue is shouted, some is inaudible. Yet the listener loses no meaning.

Miller's second insight is that although the narrative takes place on the day when the Tyrones learn that the poetic son has potentially fatal tuberculosis, their tumultuous exchange of confessions, accusations, reveries and fisticuffs is not a night unlike all other nights. Even the climax, when the morphine-addicted matriarch, Mary Tyrone, comes downstairs in her wedding ! dress and talks to unseen listeners as if she were again a girl of 16, merely echoes horrors that the family has experienced, as one of them says, "a million times." Hence, the Tyrones interact chiefly in the tender and funny moments. When bile is spewing, they do not listen spellbound but retreat protectively into themselves. This interpretation sacrifices the emotional wallow of catharsis for the cumulative, thudding ache of knowing the family will endure these scenes again and again.

James Tyrone, the actor-father whom O'Neill based on his own parent, has become a classic test for performers. In contrast to most of his predecessors, Lemmon does not swagger or thunder. He portrays a fussy little man, no longer an authority to his alienated wife and grown sons, a scrappy survivor baffled by his family of self-destructives. He withholds emotion until the pivotal scene when he tells his tuberculous son about a stark immigrant youth: the stoic mother he loved, the weak father he despised, the brilliant Shakespearean career he threw away to tour year after year in an easy-money melodrama. When he speaks of the theater, and only then, the light of love shines in his eyes. The moment is as unmistakably right as everything else in Miller's production. This Tyrone is no bombastic tyrant. His is a deeper, darker, ultimately more ruinous familial sin: selfish indifference.