‘Long Day’s Journey’: A Familiar Trip : O.C. Theater: Co-stars Mitchell Ryan and Salome Jens know Eugene O’Neill’s work and each other well.

Salome Jens and Mitchell Ryan were having a bit of a laugh trying to fit “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” set in 1912, into the election year “family values” debate.

“It’s like a joke,” Ryan said. “They say, ‘Well, what happened to the good old American family?’ It didn’t do anything. It just went right along, like a Honda.”

Jens and Ryan play the parents in GroveShakespeare’s production of the Eugene O’Neill classic: Mary Cavan Tyrone, the ghostly morphine addict, and James Tyrone, the blustery, penny-pinching alcoholic. Rounding out the family, are sons James Jr., who shares little with his father except a love of the bottle, and consumptive Edmund.

“It is wonderful to do (the play) in the time frame that he put it, because you can see that it’s no different today. Same stuff going on,” Jens said. “It’s right now. It could be any family, and they’re all around me. We now call them dysfunctional families.”

Jens and Ryan, interviewed together at the Gem Theater before the play opened, share a stage history that stretches back to a 1963 Joseph Papp production of “A Winter’s Tale.” They are clearly comfortable together, sharing reminiscences, laughing at each other’s jokes and completing each other’s thoughts. Their first joint encounter with the work of O’Neill came in 1968, when they starred in a Circle in the Square production of “A Moon for the Misbegotten,” which revisits James Tyrone Jr., some years later. Ryan played James Jr., who shares a moonlit night with a farm girl played by Jens.

“Moon” failed in O’Neill’s lifetime--he died in 1953--but made it briefly to Broadway in 1957, the year “Journey” won the Pulitzer Prize for drama. The 1968 production of “Moon” is generally credited with rescuing the play from obscurity--a “production that does it glorious justice,” wrote Clive Barnes in the New York Times--and garnered Jens and Ryan glowing reviews.

Critics “really for the first time recognized that it was a major play,” Jens said. The earlier production “did not do O’Neill’s play. They tried to improve on it,” she said. “What we prevailed with was the play. We just kept saying to Ted (director Theodore Mann), ‘Let’s do the written play.’ ”

Added Ryan: “Ted was wonderful enough to leave it alone and let us find it.” Ryan and Jens revived their roles several times, including a touring production.

This is the first time Jens has performed in “Long Day’s Journey,” although she and Ryan once did a reading of the play together for director Jose Quintero. Ryan has twice played the older brother James in the play.

“I’ve never tackled the old man, which is a wonderful part. Quite a challenge,” Ryan said. He and Jens “have always talked about doing this play. We’re still much too young for these roles,” he said, prompting a laugh from Jens, “but we’re getting there.”

Both actors, who are in their 50s, see themselves returning to these roles in the years ahead.

“Mitch was so wonderful, because as we were working last week, he said, ‘Remember, this is just a rehearsal. We’ll be doing this for at least the next 10 years,’ ” Jens said.

“I just told everyone, ‘Don’t get too excited. We’ve got a lot of time. Just keep exploring and everything’ll be OK,” Ryan said. “I can play this part for, easy, the rest of my life, or at least until I’m so feeble I can’t walk.”

Ryan said he finds more to appreciate in O’Neill’s work each time he returns to the playwright. “Everyone says it’s a great play, but you start working on it and you see the incredible structure and the way it’s put together--it’s so masterful, the way he thought it out and the way one thing flows into the next,” he explained.

“If the dialogue . . . and the directions aren’t followed exactly the way he wrote them, it sounds false. You can feel it. It’s like playing the wrong note in a Mozart symphony.”

Jens performed at the Gem last season in “An Evening with Marlene: Falling in Love Again,” a solo show in which she played Marlene Dietrich; “Long Day’s Journey” marks Ryan’s first work with GroveShakespeare. Both said that small regional companies such as Garden Grove’s often constitute a bright spot in an otherwise bleak environment for serious theater.

“Lee (Strasberg) said a theater won’t work unless it really serves a community, which is the value of this theater. And the more the community gets involved, that’s the only way the theater is going to remain healthy,” Jens said.

“The unfortunate thing with the theater always is (that it) is not a part of our culture. It’s something that’s acquired,” added Jens, who recently started teaching acting at USC. “My young actors all want to be stars in television and they want to make money, and it’s all about success and money.”

“Nobody wants to work, and nobody wants to go to the theater,” said Ryan.

Back to Jens: “There is another reality, and that is the cost of producing anything these days is really out of sight. What we as actors experience is that this is an act of love for us. . . . We know that the theater can’t afford to pay us. We subsidize the theater.”

Ryan and Jens both live in Los Angeles, which allows them to alternate more lucrative film and TV work with stage roles. Both look back wistfully on the New York scene of the ‘50s and ‘60s. “Tennessee Williams was in his prime and there were all these gorgeous plays,” Ryan said. “A whole bunch of playwrights were just flowering, and what happened to them I don’t know.”

“Money, honey,” countered Jens. “Economics happened to it. They can’t take the risk with the new playwrights; it’s not that they’re not there.”

Jens sees a dearth of great productions, which she says affects the next generation of actors, writers and directors. “If you’ve never seen great theater, it is very hard to say, ‘I want to aspire to that.’ Of course, they don’t know what they’re aspiring to, they don’t have any idea of the kind of power that can happen in the theater . . .

“We have to take responsibility to carry the message.”