By WALTER KERR

In “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” Florence Eldridge plays a shattered mother – her white hair drifting mistily about the damaged prettiness of her face – who has convinced herself, with the help of morphine, that her arthritic hands are the true cause of all her pain.  She stretches them out before her in the blurred light of a foggy seaside afternoon and exults “They can’t touch me now – I see them, but they’re far away!  The pain is gone.”

This, I think, is what Eugene was doing when he put to paper the searing and sorry record of the wreck of his family.  He has held up his mother, father, and his brother at the arm’s length of the stage, looked at everything that was ugly and misshapen and destroyed in them, and now the pain is gone.

It is gone, too.  Though the four-hour, endlessly savage examination of conscience on the stage of the Helen Hayes is deliberately, masochistically harrowing in the ferocity of its revelation, the agony that O’Neill felt whenever he contemplated his own beginnings is not passed onto his audience.  It is in some curious and even exalting manner exorcised, washed away, leaving in its place an undefined dignity, an agreed-upon peace, a powerful sense of exhilarated completion.

“Long Day’s Journey” is not a play.  It is a lacerating round-robin of recrimination, self-dramatization, lies that deceive no one, confessions that never expiate the crime.  Around the whiskey bottles and the tattered leather chairs and the dangling light-cords that infest the decaying summer home of the Tyrones (read O’Neill’s), a family of ghosts sit in a perpetual game of four-handed solitaire, stir to their feet in a dance macabre that outlines the geography of Hell, place themselves finally on an operating table that allows for no anesthetic.  When the light falls they are still – but not saved.

How has O’Neill kept self-pity and vulgarity and cheap bravado out of this prolonged, unasked-for, improbable inferno?  Partly by the grim determination that made him a major dramatist:  The insistence that the roaring fire he could build by grinding his own two hands together was the fire of truth.  You can disbelieve, but you cannot deny him his heat, his absolute passion.

And partly by a talent he must have picked up from the greedy and grandiose father of his:  A talent that puts words together so that actors can chew them, spit them, tear at one another’s skins with them.  Director Jose Quintero has seen to it that everyone of his present players knows how to handle that whip.

Fredric March cracks down on the skinflint monarch that O’Neill remembered as his father with majestic authority from the outset.  Laughing a bit too much and a bit too hollowly, working off his nerves with a restless cigar, snapping every insult like a guilty bulldog, he foreshadows the whole sodden fantasia of the midnight to come.  When he reaches that last grim debacle, and is forced to stumble to his feet in a slavering but heart-breaking tribute to his lost glory, he is in every way superb.

Hot on his heels is Jason Robards Jr. as the dissolute elder brother who may have led the consumptive Edmund (read Eugene) into every sort of vice to help square away his own failure.  Mr. Robards lurches into the final scene with his hands, his mouth, and his mind wildly out of control, cracks himself in two as he pours out every tasteless truth that is in him, and subsides at last into the boozy sleep of the damned.  The passage is magnificent.

Florence Eldridge makes the downward course of an incapable mother utterly intelligible.  She does not have the deep, resonant notes that will sustain her woman through the blinding, tragic memories of the center of the play; she cannot quite fight fury with fury.  Yet there is a hidden delicacy that is often touching in the shallow gayeties and transparent pretenses of a convent girl who could not survive the world.

Bradford Dillman handle the exceedingly difficult and soul-searching soliloquies of his poet who “didn’t have the makings, just the habit” with swift, sensitive skill, and Katherine Ross is excellent in the brief role of “second girl” who is permitted to tipple while her mistress mourns.  The David Hays setting is a perfect echo – curving and empty – of the universe these character wander.

For any one who cares about the American theater, “Long Day’s Journey” is, of course, an obligation.  But it is more than that.  It is a stunning theatrical experience.