A play's long journey

Robert Falls admits that his decision to direct a full-length, four-hour version of Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey Into Night" was a risk.

"What people know about O'Neill is that he tended to write long, serious plays," he says. "They think it's like medicine that's going to be good for [them], or something they'll sleep through. But I felt it was worthwhile to explore it at its real length."

His decision paid off. The play has received numerous awards since its opening earlier this month, following a successful run at Chicago's Goodman Theatre. It enters the Tony Awards with seven nominations, including all four lead actors, plus the director.

"I think it's the greatest American play," Mr. Falls says. "The other great works I've done, like Arthur Miller's 'Death of a Salesman,' and Tennessee Williams's 'A Glass Menagerie' ... and even [Edward] Albee's 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' are all masterpieces, but this one is head and shoulders above the others. It's an amazingly personal piece of art."

Set in a summer cottage on the coastline of Connecticut in August 1912, the story traces the tragic events of a family through one full day. The head of the household is James Tyrone, an old stage actor who built his career on playing the same role again and again. His wife, Mary, is a morphine addict who became hooked after their infant son died. The two surviving sons are Jamie, a failed actor who frequents whorehouses, and Edmund, at home after an adventure at sea and now afflicted with tuberculosis.

Falls explains that this was a day of "two enormous crises. Edmund will be hospitalized, and is likely to die from TB, and Mary, after trying for months to kick her morphine habit, is back on it.

"O'Neill's art completely captures every aspect of these lives, past and present - in that period, a work of psychological telescoping unmatched in dramatic literature," he says.

Falls says he enjoys seeing the way audiences have caught up with O'Neill's "raucous, black Irish comic sense."

"We think of him as the gloomiest of writers, but there's a great richness of humor in the writing. He can be terribly funny, with that bleak comedy deliberately interwoven to relieve the tension."

One major aspect of the play's revival that has created excitement is the casting. To play the tortured Tyrone family, Falls has assembled Brian Dennehy and Vanessa Redgrave as the parents, Philip Seymour Hoffman as the bitter Jamie, and Robert Sean Leonard as Edmund, the playwright's alter ego.

"Rarely have I seen four actors so well-suited to their roles. They're all great theater actors, capable of carrying any film, television, or theater production on their own, but they've also distinguished themselves by knowing how to step back into an ensemble," Falls says. "Another feature, which was deliberate on my part: They physically resembled each other in the way O'Neill intended."

For Brian Dennehy, portraying the Tyrone patriarch "is a dream come true," he says. In 1999, Mr. Dennehy won a Tony for his performance as Willie Loman in Miller's "Death of a Salesman," also helmed by Falls.

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