PBS Offers the Painful Beauty of ‘Journey’

A beautiful production of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” airs on PBS’ “Great Performances” Sunday night, good enough to make you forget any thrashing huff-and-puff interpretations you may have endured.

At the core of Eugene Gladstone O’Neill’s masterpiece--was any American playwright ever stuck with a more ironic middle name?--lies a sad, indelible family, the Tyrones, holed up in a drab New London, Conn., summer home. This unnervingly intimate 1996 Canadian adaptation of the 1994 Stratford (Ontario) Festival revival doesn’t force a moment.

Director David Wellington (“The Kids in the Hall”) hasn’t done anything so silly as opening up the action. Yet Wellington and the Stratford ensemble have opened things up emotionally about as far as they can go, within the bounds of a straightforward interpretation. Neatly trimmed to three hours, O’Neill’s drama has rarely played so buoyantly. Family dramas come and go; on TV, they come and go and come and go all the time. This one’s a keeper, an exceptional filmed play from every well-considered angle.

“Here’s health and happiness,” toasts James Tyrone (William Hutt), the veteran actor with the mellifluous matinee idol voice. He might as well be saying “Bring out your dead.” The health is not good, the happiness both meager and bitter in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” O’Neill described his peak achievement as steeped in tears and blood, but it’s steeped in just as much alcohol and longing, a longing to make peace with (and theatrical sense of) a family hooked on resentment.

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That’s the drug of choice for James; his wife, Mary (Martha Henry), slipping back into morphine addiction; their son Edmund (Tom McCamus of “The Sweet Hereafter”), consumptive, sensitive, a poet in pain; and Edmund’s older brother, the alcoholic “Broadway sport” Jamie (Peter Donaldson, not quite up to the other actors’ level). Martha Burns plays Cathleen, the “second girl,” and brings a wonderful hint of flirtatious longing to the role.

The fresh thinking begins straight off, before the opening credits have even finished. O’Neill’s opening lines are heard, but we don’t see anyone in close-up for a while. Instead director Wellington focuses on Mary’s arthritic hands, a crucifix on the wall, a shoulder--telling fragments of the lives at hand.

There’s no melodrama in this approach, and none in the acting, either. Rarely has O’Neill’s peak achievement, which really is the great American drama, played so delicately. By the time the secrets and lies begin imploding, we’re softened up in the best sense, ready for the rough stuff.

Henry’s superb, wrenchingly dissolving Mary and McCamus’ extraordinarily subtle Edmund have the edge here. But Hutt brings great dignity to James. (His memory of acting with Edwin Booth is heartbreaking.) Throughout, Ron Sures’ music for string quartet lends a touch of mellow grandeur to O’Neill, though here and there it’s a bit much. But only a bit. Don’t be surprised if this “Long Day’s Journey” brings you something akin to Edmund’s memories of the sea--an appreciation of an ensemble distinguished by “peace and unity,” despite the cruel lack thereof in their characters. It’s painful, this play. In terms of craft, though, this rendition is exhilarating.

* “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” airs 9 p.m. Sunday on KCET and KVCR.