New York Times, April 27, 1986

Lemmon Relives the Past in O'Neill's Journey

When the curtain descends on Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey Into Night," as shattering a moment as the American theater knows, Jack Lemmon lets out a moan that sounds soul-deep. It is the final personal stamp in a performance as James Tyrone that promises to stir passions and incite debates much as Dustin Hoffman's Willy Loman did two seasons ago. Similarly, the revival under Jonathan Miller's direction, which opens tomorrow at the Broadhurst, dares to defy the traditional approach to O'Neill, which saw its ultimate expression in the Jose Quintero-Jason Robards revival of "The Iceman Cometh" earlier this season.

Just as Hoffman's bantam rooster of a salesman liberated Willy Loman from the hulking, lumbering style of Lee J. Cobb, so Lemmon's Tyrone stands apart from such previous interpreters as Fredric March, Spencer Tracy, Ralph Richardson and Laurence Olivier. In their hands, Tyrone was the architect of domestic despair - a niggardly, hectoring tyrant largely responsible for one son's alcoholism, another's poor treatment for tuberculosis and his wife's addiction to morphine.

Lemmon regards his Tyrone as a decent man with some indecent traits, a faded dandy aware of his self-delusions, a man as much victim as victimizer. Toward that end, Lemmon has assembled an arsenal of detail - combing his hair when he enters the room, briskly opening the morning mail over coffee, turning a sincere plea to his sons into a little performance. But most of all the 61-year-old actor depends on the image he has built through three decades of film and stage work: the Everyman.

From his comic turns in "Mister Roberts" and "Some Like It Hot" to his sad losers in "Save the Tiger" and "Days of Wine and Roses" to his suddenly politicized common men in "Missing" and "The China Syndrome," Lemmon has sent one consistent message to his audiences: This could be you. Even sitting for an interview in Washington, the last pre-Broadway stop for "Long Day's Journey," Lemmon seemed every bit the Average Joe, with his jeans and terrycloth shirt, his golf clubs in the hall and fishing magazines on the table.

But with Tyrone, Lemmon maintains, the Everyman reputation is a mixed blessing. "I don't see many pluses to it," he said. "It may be difficult to get people to accept me as Tyrone. I think a lot of people don't.

But I was surprised that a few people early on said, 'Gee, that's the first time I liked the old man.'

"All I know is that I understand him. I think it's when his son Edmund calls him 'a stinking old miser' and he thinks for a minute and says, 'Maybe I am. I just can't help it.' He's not an evil man. Above all, the thing I felt and tried to accentuate is the genuine love in the family, especially between James and Mary. Because if it isn't there, an audience would say, 'Why did they go through it?' and they'd be right to wonder."

Lemmon's communion with Tyrone should not surprise, for the character reflects both a logical extension of many of Lemmon's other roles and a variety of his own experiences as a son and father. Lemmon had never seen a production of "Long Day's Journey" until joining this one, and he had never put Tyrone on his wish-list of roles - Iago, Richard III, Christopher Mahon in "Playboy of the Western World" -but once he began working on Tyrone he felt he knew him.

As both performer and pincher of pennies, Tyrone reminds Lemmon of his own father. "My father had a touch of Tyrone in him," Lemmon said, "and maybe it's in my performance. The self-made man from a meager background. I remember vividly when I was a child that if I asked for a nickel, I got a lecture of 'When I was your age, I had a paper route and by the second year I added magazines to it.' If we left a bloody light on when we went out and he saw it, there'd be a five-minute lecture almost like Tyrone's electric light company speech.

"For my father to be able to retire at 60 was a feather in his cap. I remember his pride in saying how much money he would leave behind. Even if it meant depriving himself. He would tell us to the dollar how much he was leaving. Because in his family, to be able to do that was like being a king. It was so important to him. Unfortunately."

While John Uhler Lemmon made his living as an executive of the Doughnut Corporation of America, he also was an amateur barbershop singer and soft-shoe dancer and a storyteller whose gift for blarney earned him the nickname "Lyin' Lemmon." He adored the stage and introduced Jack to it early in childhood.

"I remember one night way back," Lemmon said, "when Bill (Bojangles) Robinson was doing the 'Hot Mikado' in Boston. My father knew someone in the show, and we were invited to this after-show dinner at a nightclub. They got my father up with Bill Robinson with the orchestra and the two of them were doing a soft-shoe. He was up there throwing sand on the floor and doing the shuffle. They could hardly get him offstage." Lemmon's memories of his mother are touchier, more complicated - a zone of history he tends to guard from outsiders. Millie Lemmon was herself a would-be performer who backed away from the theatrical life because, like Mary Tyrone, she considered it unsuitable for a proper young woman. She gave birth to Jack two months prematurely in a hospital elevator and, like Mary Tyrone after the difficult birth of Edmund, resolved to have no more children. Her marriage to John Lemmon was one of enormous love and enormous incompatibility; the couple separated when Jack was 18, but they never divorced and lived no more than a mile apart for the rest of their lives.

In a final parallel to the fictive Mary Tyrone and to Eugene O'Neill's actual mother, . Lemmon tried to numb her loneliness with chemicals. Her choice was not morphine but alcohol and sleeping pills. She successfully cut back her use after nearly dying from mixing the two depressants, but before that she was a regular at the bar of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Boston. She was so regular, in fact, that she sought in complete seriousness to arrange to have an urn containing her ashes maintained at the bar. Twice, the hotel returned the $400 checks she had sent to ensure perpetual care.

"She was a nut, a real crazy nut," Lemmon said, clearly meaning eccentric rather than insane. "You never knew what she was going to do." He chuckles at some inner memory, then turns somber. "She was never gone to the extent of Mary Tyrone, thank God. But it was hard on her the years my father traveled, the time after they separated. She never got over some of that. And knowing her in some peculiar way helped me, even unconsciously, to understand what James Tyrone feels about Mary."

As the famous-actor father of a struggling-actor son, Christopher, Lemmon also brings strong personal feelings to the relationship between James and Jamie Tyrone, which itself closely paralleled the real life symbiosis of James and Jamie O'Neill.

"Something that's never discussed in the play," Lemmon said, "is that part of Jamie's problem is that it is terribly difficult to go into your old man's profession - especially if your old man is famous. It's 'Let's see what the kid can do. Can he measure up?' And fortunately Chris has done well. But I know the hell he was going through when he just started. I remember him coming home from one of his first interviews. He'd opened the door and the agent was looking at the list and saying, 'Well, look who's here now. Let's see what the star's kid can do.' So I understand Jamie. Not only to be an actor, but to have to play the supporting parts alongside his father. It's something that scares you to death."

Beyond the familial echoes Lemmon finds in James Tyrone, there are professional ones. When he makes his Tyrone a bit of a ham, not untalented but certainly self-important, the role emerges as part of a Lemmon lineage including Scotty Templeton, the irresponsible producer in Bernard Slade's "Tribute"; Archie Rice, the pathetic song-and-dance man of John Osborne's "Entertainer," and even Father Farley, the flawed priest in Bill C. Davis's "Mass Appeal."

"I never analyzed it or looked at why I did all those parts," Lemmon said, "but perhaps it's because I had that instinctual feeling of, 'Oh boy, I know them.' If I didn't see those characters in myself, I saw them around me. I didn't like them all, but I understood them all. I especially loved doing Archie Rice, because I really understood that down-and-out vaudevillian."

What Tyrone has in common with such roles as Jack Godell in "The China Syndrome," Ed Horman in "Missing" and Harry Stoner, the garment executive planning to burn down his own factory in "Save the Tiger" - a performance for which Lemmon won the 1973 Academy Award as best actor - is a sense of risk and challenge for an actor popularly, if mistakenly, seen as a comedy specialist.

"What it really comes down to, in all the characters," Lemmon said, "is choices and priorities and deciding what's important. They're all about the changes in ideals and morals - or the lack of them. These parts are not just surface. They're not just epidermal. There's a very selfish thing in the process of choosing a role, in the sense you were attracted to it and you hope afterwards enough people will agree with you. If you do it the other way - go for the obvious hit, for the deal - you're courting disaster."

At the same time, this revisionist production of "Long Day's Journey," certainly O'Neill's masterwork and perhaps America's greatest play, hardly guarantees safe passage. While Lemmon's performance received generally good reviews in tryouts at Durham, N.C., and Washington, Jonathan Miller's direction drew fire. To try to convey the sense of a family at war, Miller has instructed his actors to interrupt and talk over each other at times. Whether the technique succeeds in that goal remains open to critical judgment. The practical, if unintended, effects have been to reduce the play's running time to three hours -at least a half hour less than normal - and to make certain passages of dialogue - unimportant ones, Lemmon contends - all but unintelligible.

"One of the reasons I wanted to do 'Long Day's Journey' with Jonathan," Lemmon said, "is that I knew it was not going to be just another revival. He would have a reason for doing it. And when we first spoke, he said very succinctly that the problem with the play as it's been done, however brilliantly, was that he didn't believe any family that argued but didn't overlap in their speech. He thought it amounted to an over-reverence for O'Neill and that it made the play less believeable.

"As far as what the critics said, they had a point in that we were reviewed on our first night in Washington and we were - and still are - a work-in-progress. The overlapping was not as clear and clean then as it's getting. But I disagreed in the sense the critics thought the whole approach was wrong. How come we can do Shakespeare 80,000 ways - this scene in, this scene out, you see the ghost, you don't? Why not with O'Neill?"

It is not that Lemmon objects to a more traditional approach. He saw the Quintero-Robards "Iceman" and calls it "bloody brilliant." But he also takes some strength from the generally enthusiastic reception that met Dustin Hoffman in "Death of a Salesman."

"There is a comparison with what we're doing in that his 'Salesman' was slightly innovative," Lemmon said. "But the key was that it worked so smoothly. I was so absolutely absorbed that I never thought, 'Oh, this is different, this is changed.' I just went with it. Innovation for the sake of innovation is ridiculous. But if a fresh approach produces good theater, then gung-ho, baby."

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