Sending Shivers of Greatness Strange Interlude

By RICHARD CORLISS

There was something about Eugene O'Neill's dour eminence as the trailblazer of serious American drama that made his critics and colleagues want to crack wise. While he toiled to bring Euripidean depth and grandeur to domestic melodrama, the nimble midgets in attendance played at defacing his stature. Strange Interlude ran for 4 1/2 hours and an impressive 426 performances; road companies packed the provinces for three seasons after its 1928 opening; the play brought O'Neill his third Pulitzer Prize, and sped him on to a Nobel in 1936. And still the jesters japed. Critic Alexander Woollcott, noting that one of the central characters was a gentleman of indeterminate sexual appetites, called Strange Interlude "a play in nine scenes and an epicene." Alfred Lunt, the doyen of Broadway actors, described it as "a six-day bisexual race." Lunt's wife Lynn Fontanne, who starred in the show, said of her nightly marathon: "This is like giving birth--it isn't worth it!"

In a revival that opened on Broadway last week after a successful run in London, Glenda Jackson & Co. are having a bit of fun with Strange Interlude, and the audience is making fun of it. Does the play deserve these responses? To an extent, yes. O'Neill was aiming for ultramodern tragedy in his tale of Nina Leeds (Jackson) and the men in her life over a quarter-century's time. Nina is an Everywoman, crippled by her need to be all women. To her dead sweetheart Gordon she must be a faithful widow. To her widowed father (Tom Aldredge) she must be a doting sister. To her weak husband (James Hazeldine) she must be a mother. To the young doctor (Brian Cox) who secretly sires her son, she must pretend to be just a friend. To her young son Gordon (Patrick Wilcox), she acts like a jealous lover. And to her devoted friend Charlie (Edward Petherbridge), she finally plays the agreeable wife. A reverberant premise; the problem is in O'Neill's pulp-opera plot, especially the revelation of a hereditary curse that propels Nina into the noblest abortion and adultery on record. That earns a titter.

These risible convolutions are undercut by another novelistic device: the interweaving of the dialogue with "spoken thoughts," asides from each character to himself and the audience. Form tangles with content here. Thematically, Strange Interlude is a tragedy about the dilemma of convention vs. desire, decorous actions vs. lancing passions. Formally, it is a tart ! comedy of contrasts between what we say and what we tell ourselves we believe. The tragedy is as hoary as a D.W. Griffith silent romance; the comedy is as up to date as The Real Thing. Appropriately, Keith Hack's production finds its tone in waggish irony, as established by Charlie, the eternal old maid. Bitching genteelly about his rivals, flouncing through life with wet rancor, Charlie is the play's most modern character. And Petherbridge's deftly broad performance connects so directly with a 1985 audience that the other men's declarations of love sound like letters from high camp. His presence amounts to a deconstruction of the text, and a radical revitalizing of it. Transformed, the play lives.

Petherbridge does tend to leave the rest of the cast stranded in anachronism. But Jackson's luscious star technique makes her tomorrow-fresh in any role. As young Nina she has the exaggerated cadences and wheedling charm of a private- school girl. Aging, her face and voice sink into stone. Throughout, she relies on the provocative mannerism of nervously jacking her chin up in moments of agitation; the demands of propriety literally give this Nina the shakes. Often enough, with unflagging energy and inspiration, Jackson sends out the shiver of greatness. At the end of each long night's journey with Nina, she must feel like a proud mother: this was worth it.