By JOHN ANDERSON

O’Neill’s nine-act dramatic marathon occurred in the John Golden Theatre yesterday, when the Theatre Guild presented “Strange Interlude” at an afternoon and night session which took a total of five hours to pass a given point.  As matters of possibly historical importance it may be reported that the survivors, at the end, seemed in good health, though withered, and that Mr. Otto Kahn and Professor Max Reinhardt achieved the ultimate in sartorial nicety by changing to dress clothes during the dinner hour, while others, less favored, merely changed the subject.

And the subject, in case there should be any unbeaten doubt after so long a siege, is life, that strange interlude in which, O’Neill says, “we call upon past and future to bear witness that we are living.”

His play is as large and as long as that to catch its meaning.  As large as life, and long enough to make an audience, which had seen the characters age of synthetic Rip Van Winkle, astonished, perhaps, at finding it still 1928, if, since I haven’t verified it, this still is.

But the bare physical endurance of the author and his players is the least of “Strange Interlude.”  Admit that it is an ordeal by watered dialogue; admit that its sprawling size does, at times, convict O’Neill of reckless waste and artistic laziness – call it even vain of its own huge bulk, and yet, and yet . . . it does manage to be profoundly engrossing, with the hypnotic fascination of seeing four people live out their tangled and twisted lives against a background of their own motives, and to the spoken chorus of their own thoughts.

For O’Neill, as in his mask-play, “The Great God Brown,” has again burst the seams of the theatre in stretching for deeper meaning and sharper truth.  His scheme is to have the characters utter not only the conventional speech of conversations, but also what is in the back of their minds, to speak not merely words, but thoughts.

It is cumbersome, and sometimes a ridiculously awkward procedure, managed mechanically by a change in voice, and the sudden halt of all motion on the stage, so that the scenes take on, intermittently, the jerky attitude of a self-starting wax works.  Though of minor importance the method is splendid for comedy, since the blurting out of hidden feelings provides an edge of rudeness that is inescapably funny in the theatre.

Much of the Freudian chorus, indeed, most of it, seems both irrelevant and in the way, not to mention the fact that O’Neill has arbitrarily, and with a selection which he failed to use on the rest of his material, tied all of it directly to the ordinary conversation of the play.  That is, he shows his characters always thinking about what they are doing and saying, whereas those who make a practice of using their minds know that they have a nasty habit of wandering all over the subconscious, and unearthing, perhaps, in the gravest crisis some silly notion about something altogether else.

With this elaborate structure O’Neill tells the story of a woman and three men who are, in her eyes, her father, her husband and her lover.  She marries one to forget a dead aviator she once loved, and has a son by another when she finds that her husband’s family is tainted with insanity.

In this calamitous melodrama he tortures all four with such searing woe, lashes them with so many fierce relationships out of their writhing inhibitions and agonizing complexes that his play wails upon the taut nerves and quivering emotions of clinical psychoanalysis.  Its taut momentum sends it screeching to a dizzy climax where long-buried secrets and smothered pain at last cry out for the plain relief of utterance.

Out of this hulk of storm-tossed life he wrenches his own philosophic musings, and sings them as ever in the lyrical ecstasy of affirmation.  He pieces together a romantic religion out of the bones of science, and reaches across pagan biology to make a god of life.

He did it before in “The Fountain” when Ponce de Leon found death in the spring of eternal youth, and in “Great God Brown,” but never before with such exhaustive and exhausting questioning, never before with such unwinking courage, or such passages of soaring poetry.

Here is, truly, a play of heft and thought enough to set aside the usual boundaries of the stage, boundaries in which a dramatist is supposed to explain his people fully by their own talk and actions; to reduce a whole character to its essential words, and so tie those words into action that drama comes out of the lives on the stage.

O’Neill dared to go outside such limitations, and the Guild, in accepting the challenge, has give production to a play which, in spite of its serious defects, remains the most provocative and interesting event of the season, and probably the most significant contribution to the American drama.

Heavy burdens are, naturally, imposed upon the actors, since their parts are more than twice the length of ordinary roles, and much more baffling to the memory, because the “thinking out loud” sections are often without literal coherence.

Space and time are too short to do more than suggest the vitality and sustained brilliance of Miss Fontanne’s playing in the principal part, or to report with what repressed intensity and adroitness of understanding Mr. Anders portrays Darrell.

Mr. (Jo) Mieleiner has provided lovely settings, Mr. (Philip) Moeller has given it sensitive and often splendidly effective direction, and the audience gave it perhaps the most patient and consecutive ear ever assembled in this town, even if one croupy old lady near your reviewer did seem to think that she was a member of the cast and spoke her thought right out, as if they might have been no more than subtitles.