By THOMAS R. DASH

In “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” presented last night at the Helen Hayes Theatre by the same group that is reviving “The Iceman Cometh” downtown, Eugene O’Neill has written a family testament, an autobiographical and pitiless exposure of the heartbreak house in which he was brought up and conditioned during his youth.

In the revelation that his father, famed and grandiloquent matinee idol, was a niggardly miser, that his mother was an incorrigible drug addict, that his older brother was a dissolute drunkard, and that he himself was a consumptive, your esteem for all the past works of the Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize playwright must arise.  It took courage and genius to overcome so bleak and destitute an environment.

Just as your esteem rises for the over-all career and contributions of O’Neill to the world’s dramatic literature, it must fall somewhat in examination his last document.  For to be utterly hones, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” while savagely incisive and harrowing as a study of embittered family, is a play that will not rank with “Mourning Becomes Electra,” Strange Interlude” and some of the dramatist’s other epic plays.

Perhaps it is the very nature of the work that precludes trenchant and compact crescendos, and that prevents it from evoking the feeling of catharsis or exaltation in the manner of the great Greek tragedies.

O’Neill is writing of his own family and every time one of the characters flays the other, or causes a scar, he or she penitently softens the sting by begging to be forgiven.  This continuous interplay of wounding and healing, of rancor and affection reveals O’Neill’s compassion and understanding for his mother and father and brother, but it detracts from the tensions that are inherent in the play and that are developed only in the final of four marathon acts.

Structurally the play is loose and often dismays the auditor with its tendency toward repeating and elaborating salient facts already established.  Between a number of the greatest scenes, and there are some of these, it meanders exasperatingly.

But there is greatness in the writing, too, and flashes of the O’Neill before illness brought his wonderful career to an end.  The heart to heart talk between the father and younger son, explaining the father’s penurious beginnings and the need for parsimony which then became habitual, is one of the most moving in the play.

The confrontation between the two brothers and the mental surgery the older one performs on the younger one’s heart is exposing his motivations provides another affecting scene.  The Ophelia-like episode when the mother, in a narcotic trance, drags her wedding dress just exhumed from an attic trunk also sends an emotional tremor through an on-looker.

In all the scenes of bickering and recrimination, there is the saving grace of love and affection.  But these familial miseries add up to an evening of gloom, which is not saved by any purgative emotional elation.

The performances are splendid.  Fredric March as the swaggering, hectoring father plays with the flamboyance expected of the matinee idol he is impersonating.  He is most effective when he describes his poverty-stricken past and the pathetic death of the potential artist in him after playing one lucrative role for many, many years.  Florence Eldridge as the fluttery and neurotic mother reveals maternal affection for her sons, and abiding affection for her husband.  In her furtive moments, when she is trying to hide her torment and drug addiction from the rest, she is truly touching.

Jason Robards, Jr., offers a tremendous study of a degraded guzzler and lusty pursuer of wenches and harlots, and Bradford Dillman evokes the sensitivity and poetic refinement of the tubercular son, who is the prototype of O’Neill himself.  In the role of a young maid of the house, Katherine Ross is pert and attractive.

For the cognoscenti and for devotees of O’Neill, these flagellations and psychological penetrations into the pitiful ruins of a family may prove stimulating.  But for the neutral and dispassionate observer and for the rank and file of theatergoers, “A Long Day’s Journey Into Night” may prove a long night’s journey without too much daylight.