O'Neill's Last Play

When Playwright Eugene O'Neill in 1941 inscribed the work to his wife Carlotta, he called it "this play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood." So personal and painful were its harsh, acid scenes that O'Neill withheld publication or performance until after his death. As he lay dying, he asked that the first performance of his last play be given in Sweden, where his popularity was always greater than it was in the U.S. Last week, two years after his death and 15 years after the play's birth, O'Neill's wish was fulfilled. Long Day's Journey Into Night had its world premiere at Stockholm's Royal Dramatic Theater.

Trying Spectacle. King Gustaf VI Adolf, Queen Louise, and a dazzling audience of Sweden's artistic, social and political celebrities, including the whole diplomatic corps, packed the theater. They sat down to witness a trying spectacle, as demanding on the audience as on the cast. Long Day's is less a drama than a dramatized autobiography. Its four long acts, all in one grimy set, take 4 1/2 hours to perform. There is no plot, no story, no anecdote, nothing to relieve the dark, brooding atmosphere of tragedy that stretches from early one morning in 1912 to late the same night in the living room of the Tyrone family's summer home.

The Tyrone family does not make a pretty picture. The mother (Inga Tidblad) is a dope fiend. The father is an actor (as O'Neill's father was) and a monumental skinflint. Jamie Tyrone is a wastrel and a drunkard like his father, and Edmund (Jarl Kulle), obviously patterned on O'Neill himself, is a consumptive. These four haunted characters spend their long day's journey into night gnawing at each other. They sit around the living room table drinking, talking, baring their minds, hating each other, yet cemented together in one miserable unit of family love which survives all the bitterness and pain.

Another Corpse. "None of us can help the things life has done to us," says the mother early in the play. "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." The true selves of these complex people have been twisted into and out of shape by life. Edmund thinks Jamie is mad when Jamie says, "The dead part of me hopes you won't get well." He adds that maybe their father is glad that dope "has got Mama again! He wants company, he doesn't want to be the only corpse around the house!"

As the curtain fell, the audience rose and applauded for almost half an hour, while the cast took more than a dozen curtain calls. Critical reaction ranged from Svenska Dagbladet's "One of the most powerful realistic dramas written in this century," to the Morgan-Tidningen's "The most gripping picture of hell that has ever been seen in the theater." But one first-nighter grumbled that "Such drawn-out, detailed probing of personalities can only keep the interest of somebody personally involved." Another offered a new title for the O'Neill opus: Four Acts in Search of a Play.

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