By JOHN CHAPMAN

Let us now forget something that everybody knows by now, that Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” is about himself, his parents and his brother.  This is a mere detail, for the drama could have been written and very possibly was written about anybody else.  The news this morning is that “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” is a magnificent work, and last evening it was given a magnificent performance by Florence Eldridge, Fredric March, Jason Robard and Bradford Dillman.  It exploded like a dazzling skyrocket over the humdrum of Broadway theatricals.

This is O’Neill’s most beautiful play – perhaps the only beautiful one he ever wrote.  And it is one of the great dramas of any time.  In one speech, the tubercular young man who is supposed to be O’Neill declines to be cheered when he is told that he has the makings of a poet.  He answers that he is like a bum who has asked for a cigarette:  he doesn’t have the makings but only the habit.  In this, his next-to-last play, O’Neill, who so often yearned beyond his reach, became a poet.

It is a long play, running about three and a half hours, and one’s attention may wander for a minute here and there.  But the attention will not wander for long, because the profound compassion of the writing and the superb rightness of the acting cannot long be ignored.

A summary of the plot seems dismal enough to discourage all but the bravest playgoers from venturing into the Helen Hayes Theatre.  There are a father and mother and two sons.  The father, a noted actor, is a drunk and a miser.  The mother is a sweet dope fiend.  The elder brother is a cynical sot and the younger one is a sick and troubled boy.

It is this younger son who says, “If you don’t make allowances in the family you’ll go nuts.”  And it is these allowances – the allowances O’Neill made out of the great depths of this sympathy – which make “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” the great cleansing emotional experience that it is.

One by one, the four people in this family try gropingly to explain how and why they became the way they are.  Says one of them:  “The things life has done to us we cannot excuse or explain.  The past is the present.  It’s the future, too.”  All have been caught in a destiny they cannot alter.

As they tell of themselves, each in a long monologue, these people become larger than their own small lives; they become humanity, looking for something but not knowing exactly what it is looking for.  They are magnificent.

And the performances, under the direction of Jose Quintero, are magnificent.  Miss Aldridge reaches stunning heights in the art of acting, and so do March as her actor-husband, Robards as their hopeless and drunken son, and Dillman, the sick one with the touch of the poet in him – who is, of course, the young O’Neill who had only begun to write.

Last evening at the Helen Hayes was a great evening for the American theatre, and the first-night audience was spellbound and enraptured.