No autobiographical drama about a man's family has come from the broken heart of a dramatist with such pitiless honesty as this play "of old sorrow, written in tears and blood." The description is O'Neill's when he dedicated the original script to his wife on their 12th anniversary. So personal was the play to him that he gave instructions for it not to be produced until 25 years after his death. She remembered him emerging from his study, red-eyed and gray with exhaustion, as he wrenched the past out of him to confront and purge the wreckage of his parents, his brother and his younger self in the guise of the Tyrone family's tortured lives.

The unbearable past haunts everything in the play, even a past that long ago seemed fleetingly full of innocent potential, like Mary Tyrone's. "The past is the present, isn't it?" goes Mary's renowned question, to which she knows the answer: "It's the future, too. We all try to lie out of that, but life won't let us."

This is a family drama of scorn and blame, and love stripped naked of all illusions. This is no Iceman Cometh , where the handy oblivion of booze and pathetic pipe-dreams cauterizes unlivable life. We have the booze in Long Day's Journey , of course. It loosens the tongue. All three men in the play are alcoholics in their self-obliterating way.

James Tyrone, the patriarch and driven matinee idol who sold out for empty success, was borne into Irish-Catholic guilt and a pauperism that turned him into a foolish, cruel miser. The eldest son, Jamie, deadening himself with drink and Broadway whores, is the sneering, failed version of him. He followed in the daunting footsteps of the belittling, famous father for a while on the stage and all but killed his life.

Then there's the younger brother and fledgling writer, Edmund (the stand-in for O'Neill), whom Jamie worships and hates as the favorite son. In a concluding blood-letting scene between the two brothers that is terrible to witness, Jamie turns on Edmund, confessing that he never wanted him to succeed:

"Made my mistakes look good. Made getting drunk romantic. Made whores fascinating vampires instead of poor, stupid, diseased slobs they really are. Made fun of work as a sucker's game. Never wanted you to succeed and make me look even worse by comparison, wanted you to fail. Always jealous of you. Mama's baby, Papa's pet!"

During the course of the play, two key events happen that will release the floodgates of family hatred: Edmund will learn he has consumption-a potential death sentence-for which his father is too cheap to get the best medical treatment; and Mary Tyrone will return to the morphine addiction that began with the difficult birth of Edmund.

The innocent convent girl who fell for the handsome young actor, James Tyrone, is both matriarch and monster. It's a mistake to imagine her as a sweet, tragic victim. No one in the family puts anyone down as much as she-or, with one flippant remark, is able to induce more crippling guilt in Edmund for being born. Was she ever happily married to Tyrone? She is a woman who's been robbed of life by her husband's life. Her disappointment is disguised, yet still palpable. And now she's a pale ghost of herself in a fog of drugs and frightening aloneness. "None of us can help the things life has done to us," she says pathetically, and we believe her. "They're done before you realize it."

Mary is the shadow over the entire play, as the New England fog itself shrouds the Tyrones' home. But the feared, embittered ham James Tyrone remains at its center. "Then in the spring something happened to me," go the last words of the play spoken by Mary as if in a dream. "Yes, I remember. I fell in love with James Tyrone."

If we have gone thus far with the great play-and at four hours in length, O'Neill will always test us a bit and compel us to stay with him-those last few lines from Mary are so beautifully, nakedly simple they actually capture her entire life. "Yes, I remember. I fell in love with James Tyrone." O'Neill's magnificent achievement is to do this with all four protagonists in a single day-the journey into night that will convey the truth about them all.

Harold Bloom eloquently summarized the enduring effect Long Day's Journey has on us and the terrifying contribution of O'Neill : "He is the elegist of the Freudian 'family romance,' of the domestic tragedy of which we all die daily, a little bit at a time. The helplessness of family love to sustain, let alone heal, the wounds of marriage, of parenthood, and of sonship, have never been so remorselessly and so pathetically portrayed, and with a force of gesture too painful ever to be forgotten by any of us."

I would add only: There but for the grace of God go us. And that, when all is said and tragically done, the play is about love. It's about love-"until at last everything comes between you and what you'd like to be," as Mary Tyrone understands, "and you've lost your true self forever."

And, by now, you will have sensed my reluctance to report the disappointment I felt in Robert Falls' unbalanced new production on Broadway. Though some of my colleagues have been inspired by the cast-Vanessa Redgrave in particular-it gives me no pleasure to say that I could sense neither a family onstage nor a performance that is honestly and truly moving. If O'Neill cannot move us, nobody can.

To be sure, Ms. Redgrave is affecting-how could this great actress not be? She captures the flickering mood changes of Mary as well as a certain manipulative danger, but her tempo is deliberately slow (a habit she has fallen into), her delivery consciously flat, it seems. I have seen her tread the high wire without a safety net many times. And sometimes her performances can vary wildly-even, astonishingly, within the same night. She exhilarates or perplexes us. In her company, we are never safe , at least. The star's innate unworldliness led us to hope for one of her great performances as Mary Tyrone. But Ms. Redgrave is more fey than deeply disturbing. She is flying solo.

She's acting up a storm. O'Neill made highly detailed, near-neurotic stage directions. They're his crucial subtext, the linchpin to the play. "She begins a desperate battle with herself," he writes about Mary at the close of Act I. "Her long fingers, warped and knotted by rheumatism, drum on the arms of the chair, driven by an insistent life of their own, without her consent." The drumbeat signals, dramatically enough, the morphine breakdown. But Ms. Redgrave adds an unnecessary beat of her own-ending the scene melodramatically instead by playing an imaginary piano on the table before her.

It's the wrong, showy choice, I'm afraid, externalizing what O'Neill has already spelled out. Again, at the close of Act II, Mary Tyrone is left alone and in a devastating moment confesses she's glad to be rid of the others, who are watching her with contempt and disgust. "She gives a little despairing laugh," O'Neill writes, and the curtain should descend on her cry of loneliness. But the director has indulged Ms. Redgrave, I can only assume, by ending the scene with her hugging the wall.

It isn't that O'Neill's stage directions are necessarily sacred. It's more that, in such moments, the text itself is utterly complete.

Brian Dennehy made a good enough Willy Loman in the Robert Falls production of Death of a Salesman , but there's no emotional texture to him here, only the leaden, blustery atmosphere of a defeated bully. Where's the grand 19th-century ham in his Tyrone? James Tyrone was a near-great actor who destroyed himself and his family. But we wouldn't know it from Mr. Dennehy's performance.

Robert Sean Leonard's Edmund dutifully gets the consumption, but not the poetry, not the passion that O'Neill surely had as a young artist in the making. Edmund is also supposed to be only 23, but with respect to Mr. Leonard, he looks a fair amount older, whereas Jamie is supposed to be the older brother by a decade. It's an important lapse, taking us further away from the heart of the play.

Philip Seymour Hoffman as a Jamie poisoned with failure blows his big scene in generalized drunkenness, but at least he injects some primal heat into the evening. If only everything had been as fine and as heartbreaking as his uninhibited delivery of the Swinburne poem that O'Neill quotes at the close, when Mary Tyrone's life has become a living death:

Let us go hence, go hence; she will not see.

Sing all once more together; surely she,

She too, remembering days and words that were,

Will turn a little toward us, sighing; but we,

We are hence, we are gone, as though we had not been there.

Nay, and although all men seeing had pity on me,

She would not see.

So let's try it this time, beginning with:

1. Give the Oscar to Albert

I hope Traffic wins Best Picture for symbolic reasons–as a way to crystallize growing sentiment for a reconsideration of the costs of indiscriminate prohibition. But when it comes to a role that's both brilliant and daring, I want Albert Finney to win for Erin Brockovich .

I think the other Steven Soderbergh movie–and Mr. Finney's role in particular–have been overlooked for their own iconoclastic stance.

Yes, Erin Brockovich is slick popular art, but it's also slick populist art. It doesn't have the hand-held effects that film-buff types swoon over in Traffic , but Erin Brockovich dares to make a case for the single most despised pariah group in America, a group that all right-thinking Americans are taught–by talking heads, late-night comics and the specious anecdotes served up by corporate propagandists–to sneer at: personal-injury lawyers.

The film doesn't make the case that personal-injury lawyers take on corporate criminals for noble, idealistic reasons (the way, say, A Civil Action did). That's what's so great about Mr. Finney's funny, nuanced, badly be-rugged portrayal: He embodies the paradox that one can do good even when acting out of self-interest. It's a concept too complex for those who parrot the anti-trial-lawyer line peddled by the corporations who have the most to hide, the most to lose and the most to fear from the piranhas of the personal-injury bar–and the most to gain from making the piranhas pariahs.

I mean, do the people who unthinkingly mouth the anti-trial-lawyer platitudes actually believe they can depend on corporate-bought governments and bureaucrats to protect them from corporate power? Or that environmentally sensitive mutual funds will convince corporations to do the right thing? It's sad the way even those on the left fall for the specious anecdotes that corporations promote to blacken the name of their most dangerous opponents. As the outspoken and much-feared medical-malpractice lawyer Harvey Wachsman once pointed out to me, many of those anti-lawyer anecdotes–like the woman who supposedly got $8 million from a fast-food chain simply because she spilled hot coffee on her thighs–completely misrepresent the situation (which, in that case, involved a policy of "super-heating" the coffee in order to discourage customers from taking advantage of their "free refill" policy, causing terrible burns to the woman's flesh).

Say this for Ralph Nader: He's been right on the money in identifying the demonization of trial lawyers as a key strategy of corporate power in America. Mr. Nader has consistently seen through the myths that have grown up around the phony "tort reform" crusade. Others on the left tend to insist that people must not only do the right thing, but they must also do it for the right reasons or else it's not good enough. And conservatives–who worship the market, and who should favor private rather than governmental solutions to social evils–can't see that Erin Brockovich -type lawsuits are , in fact, a "private-side" remedy, a market solution, a libertarian alternative to regulation.

And people in the media are reluctant to admit that, in fact, trial lawyers by default do some of the best investigative reporting around. That time after time, major prize-winning investigative coups result from a trial lawyer pursuing "discovery" in a lawsuit against a corporate wrongdoer. And that the much-disparaged practice of contingency fees can put a powerful weapon for redressing injustice in the hands of the poor, who otherwise would be shut out of the court system.

In some ways, it's a class thing. Ivy-educated elites, both liberal and conservative, can chuckle together about brash money-grubbing trial lawyers who often dress too flashily for their oh-so-refined taste, or who wear gold chains or commit some other affront to their fashion sense, which allows them to feel superior despite their own ineffectuality.

That's why Mr. Finney should win the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. He plays that rare thing in films: a truly politically complex rather than politically correct character, one who challenges consensus myths on a key question of power in America. There's far more to Mr. Finney's performance than Benicio Del Toro's narky smirks and sunglasses.

2. The Other 'Respect Issue'

Despite being one of the lowest paid–in fact, least-often paid–members of my union, the Writers Guild (one screenplay and a couple of treatments to my credit; one project based on one of my books "in development"), I'm a big supporter of the "respect issues" in the current contract negotiations between the Guild and producers. Particularly on the "possessory credit" question, which could result in a head-banging smackdown between the Writers Guild and the Directors Guild.

Because if there's one group that's held in less esteem than the trial lawyers of Erin Brockovich or even the drug dealers of Traffic , it's Hollywood screenwriters.2 And the possessory-credit issue is meant to address that.

You know the possessory-credit question, right? It started out with the understandable nod encapsulated in a credit like "A Martin Scorsese Film" or "A Brian de Palma Film," but now it's gotten to the point where some guy who's making his second film–you know, an hommage to Ace Ventura: Pet Detective –can demand that it be called "An Arnie Fufkin Film." (Arnie Fufkin, of course, is the inept record promoter in This Is Spinal Tap .)

One of the things I most admire about my distinguished colleague at The Observer , Andrew Sarris, is that, even though he's the auteur of auteur theory, which focuses on directorial primacy, nonetheless he alone of all the film critics I know always lists the writer along with the director when he's reviewing a film.

It's because, as cinematically attuned as Mr. Sarris is, he's also extremely literate and knows that, in reality, every film starts as words on paper.

In architecture, it's the guy who draws up the blueprint, not the guy who lays the bricks, that gets the credit. The script is the blueprint, the writer the architect of the film. Not that the guy who lays the bricks (often in more ways than one), the director, doesn't deserve credit. I'm just saying there's an imbalance here, one that the director's possessory credit exacerbates. Of course, the directors are up in arms about the idea of giving up the possessory. But maybe there's a compromise: What I'd suggest is that, if the directors won't agree to give up their possessory credit, they agree to share it. After all, when directors both write and direct a film, they have a double credit: "Written and Directed by." So why not a Sarris solution to the question to avoid internal guild strife? If there's to be a possessory credit, give it to both .

Meanwhile, I support my fellow, more productive and successful film writers in their struggle for respect. Despite their material success, Hollywood writers are also cultural pariahs, knee-jerk objects of ridicule like the trial lawyers.

Maybe it's their internalized self-loathing that is responsible for what I'd call the other "Respect Issue" involving writers and Hollywood: the ridiculous way real writers are portrayed in Hollywood films.

I'm not just talking about Michael Douglas in Wonder Boys –although that film was bad enough in its travesty-like depiction of the creative process–writers are just so wacky–but also Tobey Maguire's creepy vision of a sensitive young writer in the same film. (On the other hand, Robert Downey Jr.'s version of a wacked-out editor totally rocked and should have gotten him an Oscar nomination).

I'm not just talking about Sean Connery posing as J.D. Salinger in Finding Forrester . In fact, these are just the latest in a long history of travestying writers in Hollywood, particularly novelists. Poor Fitzgerald, reduced to solemn, stolid caricature in Beloved Infidel . Poor Hemingway, abused by Alan Rudolph in The Moderns and turned into a teen heartthrob by miscast Chris O'Donnell in In Love and War .

Maybe it's the revenge of the screenwriters on the novelists: Hollywood writers love to depict non-Hollywood writers as suffering losers, so pitiful and ridiculous that they don't have to feel bad about selling out their ideals to avoid a fate like that.

That said, I'd argue that there are at least two truthful portraits of writers in Hollywood movies, both of them by Jack Nicholson. One is his Eugene O'Neill in Reds . It's just a glimpse, a portrait sketched in acid, but one with inner strength and dignity as well, a tragic sense of life that pretty-boy Beatty as John Reed utterly lacks.

Mr. Nicholson really got into doing O'Neill; not surprisingly, there's a temperamental similarity. They're both caustic black-Irish types, romantic obsessives. "One of the keys that unlocked O'Neill for me," Mr. Nicholson once told me (in a Times Magazine interview), "was the fact that he couldn't write with anything but a pencil. He couldn't adapt to the typewriter. He couldn't dictate." And when O'Neill came down with a degenerative disease, "he literally couldn't hold the pencil. I mean there's something very sensual about lead coming off the pencil. It's one of the purest things." (The Nicholson interview is reprinted in my new nonfiction collection, The Secret Parts of Fortune . Hey, this is one of the things those of us who are not wealthy screenwriters have to do.)

But if you want to know the truth, the truly great Nicholson portrait of a writer–or, let's say, of the dark side of the writing life–is the one to be found in The Shining . It's a horror movie about the horror of writer's block. Yes, it's kind of an exaggeration for comic horror effect, but it does something unique: It captures the pain of it all beautifully, so much so that I get instant assent whenever I suggest to other writers that it's a great writers' movie. As one friend put it: "It captures the pain, which is what drives you nuts when you meet some dentist at a party and he says, 'So, you're a writer. You know, I've often thought about writing myself.' Yeah, and I've often thought of drilling my own teeth."

3. ShortTakes

The Pat Hobby Stories : The last stories Fitzgerald wrote, his brilliant, underrated kiss-off to the Hollywood that broke his heart, told in the form of linked comic-satiric stories about a Falstaffian hack screenwriter, Pat Hobby, who was "big in the silent days" but just can't cut it in talkies. What pitches it above mere farce is the bleak, melancholy streak of self-portraiture and self-loathing that informs it: Fitzgerald's displaced vision of what became of him when the kissing had to stop.

The Dick Gibson Show : A recent Edgy Enthusiast applicant asked me to mention this amazing Stanley Elkin tour de force about the odyssey of a radio host through the pre-TV era. You've got to pick this up: I've said before in these pages that the Dr. Behr Bleibtrau episode may be the single best-sustained piece of comic genius in all recent American literature.

King of Comedy : I have to throw this in because I caught it on cable recently and somehow it keeps getting better, perhaps because its acid satire of celebrity obsession grows more and more grimly prophetic. Sandra Bernhard and Robert De Niro and (yes!) Jerry Lewis are all astonishingly good. I don't understand why it wasn't a hit when it came out, but I think it will be remembered as one of Martin Scorsese's very best, perhaps his most original work.

James Buchan's Heart's Journey in Winter : I should have included this in my column two weeks ago about Kim Philby and the F.B.I. mole. It's simply the best post-Philbian mole novel, but it's far more than that: It may be the best political novel of the entire Cold War period, equal to anything of John Le Carré's.

The "Grand Inquisitor" episode in The Brothers Karamazov : Laura Bush recently said this was her favorite episode in all literature, because she found it "reassuring." I guess it depends on what you mean by "reassuring." If you think the single most vicious and profound satiric attack on organized religion is reassuring, then this is the book for you. I'm down with Laura on that.

Instant karma on Survivor : Tell me it's an accident that Mike, the guy who was so pleased with himself for his psycho-killer-like multiple stabbing of that poor, slow-witted pig, got the very hands he used to kill and roast the unfortunate beast roasted themselves two episodes later. Who's the real swine?

Resisting Hitler : A truly important book by Shareen Blair Brysac about (primarily) two brave women in Hitler's Germany: Mildred Fish-Harnack, an American woman who became a spy for the so-called "Red Orchestra," and Martha Dodd, the femme fatale daughter of the American ambassador to Germany, who put her reckless, romantic spirit into the anti-Hitler struggle.

Alan Greenspan, bungler: Can we finally put an end to the ridiculous cult of this pompous fool, who brought on a recession basically because he was terrified that low-pay hourly workers might get raises and thus cause "inflationary pressure," even though there was no evidence this was actually happening? Look it up: That's why he caused a recession, by racking up interest rates in the face of full-employment prosperity–the fear that the busboys might get a few cents more an hour to clean the crumbs from his table. And yet the media still treats him like an infallible pope, when in fact his bungling has now caused hundreds of thousands of lost jobs and blighted lives.

A Grand Guy by Lee Hill: another Hollywood-writer tragedy. A lovely, sad biography of Terry Southern, one of my early heroes, who caught a wave when he helped make Dr. Strangelove the unique, absurdist, visionary work that it was, and then was left floundering by the film world for the rest of his life when the tide went out.

Bonus Pick of the Week: The Official Spinal Tap Companion . The great reference work about the great satiric vision of American culture. Don't dare miss it.

In the strong competition for best actor, the battle will be between the Irishman Gabriel Byrne in A Moon For the Misbegotten and the Englishman Stephen Dillane in The Real Thing . Those two fine American actors Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly, both nominated for their terrific work in True West , will split their vote, and the fifth nominee, David Suchet for Amadeus , must be considered a long shot.

Mr. Dillane's performance as Henry, Tom Stoppard's alter ego in The Real Thing , could scarcely be better. I found him more convincing, too, than Jeremy Irons' previous Henry glibly poncing about the place in a silk dressing gown (as writers always do, of course). The secret to Mr. Dillane's brilliance and charm is in his reticence. But then, Mr. Byrne is a wonderfully unshowy actor, too, and the role of Eugene O'Neill's tragic fallen angel, James Tyrone Jr., is surely one of the biggest challenges an actor could take on. The long, awesome confessional in Act 2 alone would break the back of a lesser man.

In my original review of A Moon for the Misbegotten , I wrote that Mr. Byrne's amazing performance is one for the ages: "Self-pity isn't his game. He understands those sufferers who have already died of self-disgust, and will die again. Mr. Byrne's lacerating honesty is in perfect tune with Eugene O'Neill's, and he is giving the performance of a lifetime." I so much hope that he will receive our thanks with the Tony Award.

Best actress? The splendid Rosemary Harris, who did a lot of crocheting in Waiting in the Wings , is competing against her immensely talented daughter, Jennifer Ehle, who's lovely in The Real Thing . But I think the battle will be between Jayne Atkinson for her Lizzie Curry in The Rainmaker and Cherry Jones for her Josie in A Moon for the Misbegotten . The fifth nominee, Claudia Shear of Dirty Blonde , is popular with some. But again, Eugene O'Neill's Josie is the most challenging role for an actress in the entire modern repertoire. She is O'Neill's fantasy woman, a farm worker, a beautiful slut, a virgin, daughter, substitute wife, Mother Earth and female Christ. Only the greatest actresses can do justice to the sheer strength and yearning and transcendent love of this near-impossible role. Ms. Jones' contribution is stunning in its grace and compassion. She's a most generous actress, and deserves our thanks, too, with the Tony for best actress.

Gosh! It's getting exciting. But I am in earnest. The best play will be Michael Frayn's Copenhagen for making us feel good about thinking we truly understand quantum theory and the uncertainty principle. But Copenhagen 's intense moral and scientific debate about Nazi Germany and the invention of the atomic bomb, the nature of friendship and betrayal, or truth, deception and the fate of 20th-century history, are somewhat larger issues than the pursuit of happiness and the redemptive power of Mae West impersonators in another nominated play, Dirty Blonde . Sam Shepard's True West , another nominee, is considered a new play although it was first produced off-Broadway in 1980. It is therefore an old play that we're all pretending is new. It changes according to our perceptions (compare Heisenberg's uncertainty principle). The real reason True West is included is this: According to Tony rules, if a play is new to Broadway, it's new. If King Lear were produced on Broadway for the first time, it would therefore be a new play. Unless it were deemed a revival, or a musical.

The award for best revival of a play will be a close call between The Real Thing and A Moon For the Misbegotten . Both of them are first-rate. But on balance, I go for Daniel Sullivan's production of the O'Neill. It's a wonderful contribution on every level, including a third supreme performance from the veteran, Roy Dotrice.

Best director of a play? Matthew Warchus did fine work on True West . I thought James Lapine's contribution to Dirty Blonde somewhat overpraised. David Leveaux's direction of The Real Thing is superior to the Mike Nichols production in 1984. Mr. Leveaux freed the stage of the habitual book-lined study in chintz and got first-rate performances from everyone in the cast. But so did Michael Blakemore with his three star actors circling each other onstage in that clinical amphitheater of ideas. A decade ago, Mr. Blakemore in Copenhagen was nominated in two categories: best director of a play ( Lettice and Lovage ) and best director of a musical ( City of Angels )-but didn't win in either category. He's up for two Tonys again this year. I'm marking my card for Mr. Blakemore as best director of a play, as well as best director of a musical for his unbeatably sophisticated work on Kiss Me, Kate .

A vote for Kiss Me, Kate is a vote for sanity! Many people find The Music Man a great night out, too. But not as many as Kiss Me, Kate . I know these things. I've done the counting. The revival of Jesus Christ Superstar is a joke; Tango Argentino is a relic. Cole Porter or "76 Trombones"? My vote for best revival of a musical goes to Kiss Me, Kate .

And so, on to the controversy surrounding Susan Stroman's Contact , the Lincoln Center production that's considered the favorite to win best musical. Most of you will know by now that the issue is whether Contact should even have been eligible as a musical. Last season, the issue was whether Swan Lake on Broadway was a musical. You probably thought it was a ballet. The Tony Awards Administration Committee wasn't sure, however, and thought the matter over. They decreed that Swan Lake defied all categories of play, revival or musical. Whatever it was, it wasn't eligible. But here's the catch. The committee decided that the director of Swan Lake , Mathew Bourne, could nevertheless be nominated as best director of a musical. And he won! He was elected the best director of a musical that isn't a musical.

Let's look at Contact . Before it opened, Ms. Stroman described it solemnly as a "dance-play," or a play that's danced. In the essentials, a dance-play is no different from any modern dance choreographed by, say, Paul Taylor or Twyla Tharp. Contact has no original musical score and no one in the cast sings. Its music is a compilation of Grieg and Puccini and others, with pop standards on a prerecorded track. (There's no orchestra.) It is an evening of three danced sketches or vignettes. They're vaguely about contact through swing dance, and John Weidman is credited with writing the book.

There are those who do not think Contact is much of a musical, least of all a revolutionary one. And some even see it as a dated piece, dance critics among them. But tell me: Aren't musicals for singing? And don't we like to applaud the singer as well as the song? If Contact was conceived as a dance-play, when did it transform itself into a musical? If it's now eligible for a best musical award, why not a dance piece by Twyla Tharp? Why not Swan Lake ? How about Copenhagen ?

Good luck to them all, anyway, at the Tonys.

I know of no finer performances anywhere than the supreme ones of Cherry Jones, Gabriel Byrne and Roy Dotrice. The three of them are magnificent, bringing honor to O'Neill's last drama that amounts to a Miracle Play in its pain and compassion and absolution. Ms. Jones and Mr. Dotrice deserve every praise, God knows. (And what a joy it is to see the veteran Roy Dotrice on Broadway again). But at the risk of running out of superlatives before we've scarcely begun, Gabriel Byrne's tormented James Tyrone Jr. touches such greatness in the strength of his dark emotional honesty that I cannot imagine a different Tyrone, let alone a better one. Mr. Byrne's restrained, amazing performance is one for the ages.

O'Neill quite famously based the central story of Moon for the Misbegotten on his guilt-ridden, alcoholic brother, James. He had portrayed him previously in Long Day's Journey into Night and the 1947 "family" play that followed shows him in his early 40's, the ghost of an Irish charmer close to death from booze and despair. A Moon for the Misbegotten is an Irish play in its humor and romantic spirit, and a Catholic one in terms of Barbara Gelb's apt description of it as "a mass for the long-dead brother he had once dearly loved but had come to resent."

The piece is O'Neill's extraordinary benediction of his doomed, suffering brother who is forgiven in memory of their mother. It's a heartbreaking confessional of a play, a form of blood-letting that hinges on Tyrone's agonized confession, in the arms of Josie. When the mother he loved was dying on a train journey they were taking together, she awakened long enough to see him stupefied with booze. He was terrified of losing her. But on the train bringing her coffin home, he spent the time with a hooker and was too drunk to make the funeral.

Critics tell you what they know, never what they don't know. While we're on the subject of confessions, let me make one of my own about Eugene O'Neill. I cannot figure out how his plays work! How do they achieve greatness when most everything he does seems to fly in the face of it? He repeats his messages ad nauseam ; his plotting is clumsy; the texts are long and overwritten, as if daring cuts. Look at what appear to be glaring weaknesses in Moon for the Misbegotten . If you read the play, the lengthy Act One exposition seems laborious, the Freudianism naïve, the comedy leprechaun-quaint. He actually describes his 28-year-old heroine, Josie, as "so oversize for a woman that she is almost a freak." She's a farmworker who could, apparently, deck a cart horse with a single blow.

She is also O'Neill's fantasy woman, a beautiful slut, virgin, daughter, substitute wife, Mother Earth, and female Christ. Who could play such a "freak"? Worse, the pivotal confessional scene between Tyrone and Josie that must take place "on a night different from any other under the moon" appears to set the stage not for tragedy, but for romantic melodrama.

O'Neill is risking a mighty fall with the play, and it failed badly when it was first produced. (But it wasn't well cast.) He never saw a successful production during his lifetime. It wasn't until Jose Quintero's 1973 staging with the now mythic performances of Colleen Dewhurst and Jason Robards that its greatness was revealed. And Ms. Dewhurst was able to offer this brilliantly irreverent insight into O'Neill's apparent flaws: "Like many great playwrights who are in some ways terrible writers but wonderful playwrights, he overwrites because he's afraid. He forgets the actor…"

O'Neill lives only in the company of great actors, as the cast of this fine new production of Moon for the Misbegotten , superbly directed by Daniel Sullivan, make it truly alive. One cannot scrape by with O'Neill (or you'll think him a "terrible writer"). What appears overwritten on the page can become in performance what Walter Kerr described admiringly as "life made on the wing rather than painstakingly remembered. It is an honest life and, for O'Neill, an unusually lyrical one; the crafty, the damned and the forgiving breathe."

It is a love poem that O'Neill has written with Moon for the Misbegotten , and perhaps its unembarrassed, elemental emotion is its

real secret. It was born in agony. Yet it can be funny enough, particularly in the experienced hands of Roy Dotrice's crafty Phil Hogan, who's the father of Josie and as crooked as a corkscrew. Described as "spry on his legs as a yearling and as full of rage as a nest of wasps," Mr. Dotrice plays the old goat to perfection. His opening words to Josie–"Haven't you a tongue in your head, you great slut you?"–are affectionate in their rough way. He surely loves her, knowing the bigger truth about her.

Act One is banter and low comedy–the parody of the arrogant, wealthy neighbor (a countrified yuppie of his day) who's sent packing by the impoverished Phil and Josie in their shanty. The mood remains light, even with the entrance of the handsome landlord, Tyrone, glimpsed in the distance "like a dead man walking slow behind his own coffin."

"Mother me, Josie. I love it," Tyrone says sardonically to Josie, who's concerned about him killing himself with drink.

Yet it is the purest love he craves in the warm, protective embrace of a lost mother. James Tyrone is a man in search of forgiveness. At heart, he and Josie are cut from the same pure cloth, and both sense each other's secret. They are like fallen angels. He with his ghostly damnation and whores in New York; she, the self-proclaimed village slut who's really a virgin. When she describes herself off-handedly to him as "only a big, rough, ugly cow," he responds with the simple truth. "You're beautiful…You're beautiful to me…You're real and healthy and clean and fine and warm and strong and kind."

Mr. Byrne touches every emotional note without seeming to try. Yet he's playing a man who is emotionally dead, choking on a guilt that's killing him. The wounded Tyrone with his trembling hands itchy for another whisky has watched "too many dawns come creeping grayly over dirty windowpanes." Mr. Byrne knows his Black Irishmen, and he has the look of one, too. Self-pity isn't his game. He understands those sufferers who have already died of self-disgust, and will die again. Mr. Byrne's unshowy, lacerating honesty is in perfect tune with Eugene O'Neill's, and he is giving the performance of a lifetime.

"There. There, now," Josie comforts Tyrone, sobbing cradled in her arms like a sick child. And so nakedly powerful is the confession scene between them that we feel compelled almost to hide our eyes and call out, "Pity! O, pity!" We have witnessed a kind of miracle in this passing night of grace. As Josie says with mock light-heartedness to her father after Tyrone has left her forever, "a virgin who bears a dead child in the night, and the dawn finds her still a virgin. If that isn't a miracle, what is?"

Cherry Jones' resonant notes of deep, quiet, compassionate strength and yearning for a love that will never be are stunning. A coarse earthiness might not yet have come fully to the boil in her Josie, but everything else about this near impossible role, including its quality of transcendent love, is in place in her beautiful performance. Let mention also be made of the difficult cameo roles of the runaway son, Mike Hogan, and the wealthy idiot next door, T. Stedman Harder, vividly played by Paul Hewitt and Tuck Milligan.

There are those who see in the final moments of A Moon for the Misbegotten Eugene O'Neill's state of grace, the moment when his own tortured conscience eased. "May you have your wish and die in your sleep soon, Jim darling," Josie calls after Tyrone, and completes the benediction. "May you rest forever in forgiveness and peace." But those haunting last words could also stay with us in ways that provoke unbearable sadness. Tyrone will soon die alone in a sanitarium, Josie is left to live with her father, and their purest love could not change a tragic fate. We may find understanding, O'Neill is saying. Who on earth finds peace?

It's unfortunate-to say the least-that Mr. Hirson's new play turns out to be an example of the bad theater he's satirizing. But the muddled drama itself is actually begging to be booed. The perverse Mr. Hirson spends a good deal of his time insulting the audience attending his own play as "morons" who know nothing about theater. That lonely, defiant boo at the close of Act 1 was therefore only fair and right, and I shall be adding a few of my own.

David Hirson has written only two plays, and both have been overambitiously produced on Broadway. (Both have also been directed by Richard Jones of Titanic .) Mr. Hirson's La Bête , his first play almost a decade ago, is known primarily as one of the most renowned flops in Broadway history. Written in heroic couplets, it was set in the 17th century. The hero of his Molièresque verse-comedy was an egomaniacal actor, its theme nothing less than the cultural decline of the West. Mr. Hirson's second play, Wrong Mountain , at the Eugene O'Neill Theater, has a hero who's an unappreciated poet, and its theme is the decline and fall of theater!

We must avoid the suspicion that Mr. Hirson has written Wrong Mountain as payback for the harsh critical response to La Bête . We must avoid that at any cost. (Besides, I didn't see La Bête .) The loneliness of the embittered poet is a familiar plight, however, and Salieri in Amadeus famously absolves us all of mediocrity. But Mr. Hirson's combustible 60-year-old poet Henry Dennett, played by the good Ron Rifkin with a vein-popping choleric fury that would also suit Tamburlaine the Great laying waste the world, forgives us nothing.

"You want to know what's going on inside the tent," Henry protests about all theater. "I'll tell you what's going on inside the tent! A macabre peep show for third-rate minds eager to have their sympathies titillated and their sense of humanity massaged by the dime-store imaginings of second-rate minds."

The above does not apply to Wrong Mountain , of course. I guess it's more relevant to theater in general . Anyone who appreciates Wrong Mountain as a uniquely brilliant metaphysical fable about the true nature of art and society must therefore possess a first-rate mind, like its author. But theatergoers like us, according to his dyspeptic hero, revel in "the kind of sanctimonious kitsch that's embraced by an audience of suburban morons dimwitted enough to believe that by going to a play they're having some sort of 'cultural experience.'"

Maybe so. It happens. But on balance, I believe there are no bad audiences, only bad plays. But let's not make a mountain out of a molehill. Mr. Hirson takes a few pot shots at complacent theater audiences, and we would welcome them if this smug, patronizing play truly shocked and lacerated. Then again, its central "philosophical" questions amount to the weary "Is success worth it?" (Probably not.) "Does art involve compromise?" (Yes.) And "Am I climbing the wrong mountain-or what?" (Who knows!) In such portentous ways, Wrong Mountain ends up parodying its own superior image of itself as an elevated play of ideas.

In fact, there isn't anything in it that amounts to an idea. There are mouthpieces of familiar arguments, there are facile parodies and clichés. Who doesn't value the first-rate over mediocrity? Who wouldn't prefer to see a fine play rather than trash? But Mr. Hirson's hero-poet, a vindictive bully rather than a sensitive puppy, sets himself up as the custodian of excellence. He challenges his ex-wife's fiancé, Guy, a hugely successful commercial playwright, would you believe, to a bet that he can get a play he's written produced within six months. He does just that, of course, and the deflated Guy, who's also staggeringly stupid, breaks down in tears with the words: "Goddamn you! That's the play I've always wanted to write. You're the playwright I've spent my whole life trying to be. Maybe you're right. Maybe I should aspire to writing crap. Maybe crap is too good for me after all …"

Oh dear. There's also no business like show business, you know. But no one in Wrong Mountain strikes us as real, including poor Henry with his inner heavily symbolic parasitic worm eating him away by being fed too much corn. (Geddit?) His doctor's stuck on show tunes; his family's a mess of loony intellectual pretensions; and the director of Henry's play-which is also entitled Wrong Mountain -is the usual aging queen given to calling out cozily to the company: "Group hug, everyone!"

Poor soul. He's the campy theater director of endlessly parodiable cheap laughs who's wheeled out like the comic cow in pantomime. Far from being a cultivated piece, nowhere does Mr. Hirson pander more to the lowbrow than in these awful backstage scenes fulfilling the crude notion that theater people are divinely "mad" and, well, theatrical .

And then there's the ludicrous Lithia Spring, a.k.a. the Fountain of Success. For reasons that still remain bewildering to me, Henry, the theater hater, reverses everything he believes in after the intermission. He drinks at the heavily symbolic Fountain of Success, which can be found a short train ride away, and now miraculously embraces the sentimentality of showbiz folk and the dumb triumph of acceptance. It must have something to do with the water. A transformed man, the reborn Henry loves all the awards and ovations and everything popular success can offer, which is known as having it both ways. But that's quite a disgusting commercial turn around for you, like a happy end in an episode of a so-so sitcom. It would have been a no-no in Act 1.

But is our boy happy at last? I hope I won't be spoiling it for you by confiding that the newly successful Henry is cured of his intestinal worm, but he now suffers from another heavily symbolic complaint. Alas, his doctor, the one who adores musicals, has given him a dermatological test that reveals a most serious skin disorder leaving our hero with no recognizable face. And there it is.

It's food for thought, of course. As poor old Henry put it about theatergoers: "They go to bask in the flattering image of themselves as people who are open enough to have their values challenged, which is just another way of saying that they go to the theater to have their values confirmed."

Oh, sure.

To wit: a balmy Saturday night around 11 P.M., outside the stage door of the Eugene O'Neill Theater. It was two days before Mr. Dennehy and Death of a Salesman would sweep the Tony Awards. Dozens of women were lined up behind two barricades, clutching programs from Salesman . Big, poufy beauty-parlor hairdos, median age 50. They were waiting for Brian Dennehy, their big man, their wide-bodied Willy Loman–he could eat Dustin Hoffman for breakfast!–who lumbers across the stage each night on his plastic knees. One woman, who said she had come in from Blue Point, L.I., to see the show, gripped the barricade, turned to the woman beside her and announced, "He's a Long Island boy. Went to Chaminade. One of our famous boy's Catholic schools."

Vicki Lucachick, a 55-year-old woman from Los Angeles, said she'd gladly permit Mr. Dennehy to eat crackers in bed. "Sorry, dear," she said, turning to her husband, a slender man inablueblazer. "There's something very attractive about him. My husband knows that I love him. It's hard to explain what it is. There's just this, this manliness ."

Heidi Higgins, a robust woman from Rockland County, gestured toward her fiancé, who shares a rhinocerotic body type with Mr. Dennehy. "He knows about my infatuation. That's why he got the tickets," she said. "I'm a bigger woman and I prefer bigger men."

At 11:15, a sound like an Apache battle cry came from the back of the crowd. "There he is!" Out swaggered Brian Dennehy, all 6 feet 2 inches of him, three bills easy, in pale blue jeans and a beige linen jacket, doing his best to stifle his proud Irish smile. The women pushed against the barricade. Several stood on tiptoes. Mr. Dennehy carried his own pen and began signing programs. He looked at the programs as he signed. The women kept their eyes fixed on his face.

Then one woman, a slight, 40-ish woman, did something they all wanted to do. "Can I hug you?" she asked, tentatively. He wrapped his arms around her, and for a moment she was invisible, enveloped in Dennehy flesh. Mr. Dennehy released her–she beamed–then, after yukking it up with a cop, he ducked his massive head into the waiting town car.

Brian Dennehy is a new breed of Broadway matinee idol, a man who appeals to the kind of women who buy most of the tickets to Broadway shows.

"It's about fuckin' time," said Mr. Dennehy's agent of 22 years, Susan Smith, a pleasant woman who seems to swear a lot. "We've got this idea of matinee idol all ass-backwards. It's been these 12-year-old boys with no brains in their heads who emote nothing. Brian is that old-fashioned sense of what a man is, for those people that might have seen Spencer Tracy or Gary Cooper."

Indeed, the Midwestern tourists and Long Island matinee ladies who can afford Broadway's $70 tickets can only imagine sending Leonardo DiCaprio to his room, not inviting him to theirs. In 1997, women made up 60 percent of Broadway audiences, and, on any given night, only 12 percent of the audience is from Manhattan. And the Manhattanites are more likely to be lusting after pansexual Alan Cumming in Cabaret or Kevin Spacey as the lithe and smooth Hickey in The Iceman Cometh . Actors with the kind of bodies they see in the gym every morning.

Tastes run different on mainstream Broadway. A group called the Michael Crawford Phantom Movie Campaign says that they will boycott a movie version of Phantom of the Opera if Warner Brothers casts sexy Latin actor Antonio Banderas, and not Mr. Crawford, in the Phantom role. "Banderas is not a musical star, just a pretty face … What is needed is an exciting voice and gobs of sex appeal, which is M.C.," wrote Geri A. Mellgren-Kerwin, on the campaign's Web page.

If you ask Elizabeth Franz, who won the Tony as Linda Loman in Salesman , about the 60-year-old Mr. Dennehy's sexual power, she will tell you it comes from his vulnerability.

"When you really get to know him, you realize how insatiable he is," said Ms. Franz. "He needs so much approval, but he has this incredible exterior. He needs help, he needs protection, and he needs to be taken take care of."

And there are plenty of women eager to do so. Joyce Breach, a nightclub singer in her 50's who has seen Salesman three times, the way teenage girls kept going back to see Mr. DiCaprio in Titanic , summed up her feelings as she watched Mr. Dennehy from the audience. "I would characterize it as steam heat," she said.

'Down and Out'

Ground zero of the suburban theater ladies is the Joan Hamburg Show, the Wednesday morning radio show on WOR-AM that broadcasts upstairs at Sardi's, with a studio audience of about 200. They watch the show, eat lunch, then trundle over to the matinees. Mr. Dennehy was the third guest on June 2. The ladies had given Art 's George Segal a nice reception, and Night Must Fall 's Matthew Broderick got the cheek pinching. But, said Ms. Hamburg, "When Brian came in, those women stood up . They went crazy. Everything he said, they laughed. They were thrilled. I'm telling you, they were thrilled! I've had all the celebrities on. But with this huge room, his personality is so pervasive, you could here a pin drop. You never see that."

Of course, there is a long tradition of portly guys getting the girls: Henry VIII, the Three Stooges' Curly Howard, Jackie Gleason, Luciano Pavarotti. "You know if a chubby guy wakes you up at 6:30 in the morning, it's not to go running," said Carrie Snow, a writer in her 40's living in Los Angeles who has had a crush on Mr. Dennehy even before he played a chunky alien in Cocoon .

Who is the real Brian Dennehy? As a young father, he worked as a meatpacker and a truck driver. He's an ex-Marine and politically conservative, an avid reader of the American Spectator who did stump work for Al D'Amato's failed Senate campaign. He has health problems–two years ago, he had both of his bum knees replaced with plastic ones, and in March, during the Salesman run, he was hospitalized for "exhaustion," something that initially seemed like a heart attack. "It was going out after the show and eating late and not getting enough sleep," said Lisa Protzmann, Mr. Dennehy's personal assistant at the O'Neill. She quipped, "Every restaurant in New York has been alerted not to let him drink too much." Said his agent, Ms. Smith: "Brian's had an extraordinary life, and he probably wouldn't change five minutes of it. But sometimes you pay for an extraordinary life, and he may be doing that at this juncture."

By the way, he's been married for 11 years to his second wife, Jennifer, a 42-year-old Australian brunette whom he met on the set of Return of the Man From Snowy River , on which she worked as a costume designer. They live in the sticks in Connecticut with their two young kids.

Just a couple of years ago, Mr. Dennehy wasn't signing many autographs. He was most often seen in TV ads, lurking in a dark suburban hedge, motioning toward a light in a bathroom and intoning, "She woke up with heartburn."

Before Salesman , said Ms. Franz, "Brian was down and out, in a way. He says he wasn't even doing B movies, he was doing C movies, because he had saturated the movie business. And then this came along."

"Frankly, if Gene Hackman had taken early retirement and Bob Duvall wasn't the brilliant actor that he is, Brian's career would have emerged on a different plane," said Ms. Smith.

Broadway does wonders for a flagging career. Women are also swooning over Tom Wopat ( The Dukes of Hazzard ) in Annie Get Your Gun and Richard Chamberlain in The Sound of Music . Ms. Protzmann, Mr. Dennehy's assistant, estimated that Mr. Dennehy receives three to five letters a day from smitten women who range from college age to middle age. Many of the letters include photographs and dinner invitations. One woman wrote that her widowed mother had built a shrine devoted to the actor, centered around an autographed napkin. The woman wrote that her mother had become accustomed to referring to Mr. Dennehy as her imaginary husband.

A friend of Ms. Protzmann's mother, when she heard about the young woman's job, asked Ms. Protzmann to pass a message to the star. "'I want you to tell him for me that I think he's very, very sexy,'" Ms. Protzmann recounted. "And she had this really saucy look in her eyes, you know, she kind of raised one eyebrow. I was really shocked."

One irony is that Mr. Dennehy was not cast for his sex appeal. "Of course, sex is a huge concern of producers, but they don't generally do a casting call for that," said casting director Barry Moss, who cast Jekyll and Hyde and Footloose . "They have people in mind who are known commodities. You'll hear them saying, 'Names, names, names! We need names!'"

Sean Cummisky, who monitors the comings and goings at the backstage door at the Eugene O'Neill Theater, said that Mr. Dennehy's phalanx of women was actually not the largest he had seen. That distinction belongs to Lucy Lawless, star of TV's Xena: Warrior Princess , who attracted a screaming, largely lesbian throng of 1,000 to the backstage door on her closing night playing Rizzo in Grease two years ago. Mr. Cummisky said he was taken by surprise by Mr. Dennehy's female fans, how they would try to one-up each other by claiming they'd been fans longer, or seen more of Mr. Dennehy's movies, or traveled the furthest to see Salesman . They ask Mr. Cummisky what Mr. Dennehy is like in private, if he's faithful to his wife, and if they'll be able to get a picture taken with him. "After they get the picture, they'll be like, 'Ooooh! '" he said. "It's like a really obsessed fan kind of thing. I don't see him as a sex model. And it's not only older women. You see some women about 30 years old out there."

An hour after winning his Tony Award for best actor, Mr. Dennehy was standing with Ms. Smith in the middle of Les Pyrénées restaurant. He was wearing a tuxedo he bought at Rochester Big and Tall, and scarfing down bow tie pasta with pesto, trying to avoid the question of what it's like being Broadway's biggest stud. "Oh, please," he said, between bites of a crusty roll. "I've had so many women come up to me and say, 'You know what, you remind of my father,'" he said, laughing. "Draw what sexual conclusions you wish from that, but I think that women find me a comforting, maybe powerful presence, and I don't think it goes any farther than that. Because every time I've been available for contacts, there didn't seem to be anybody there."

He paused. Chewed. "Well, not that I was terribly lonely," he said. He looked at his agent. "Susan was funny. I used to go out with all these models, and I'd say, 'Susan, what do you think?' And Susan would say, 'She's dumb as a fuckin' post.' And I says, 'Yeah, but what does that got to do with anything?'"

I happen to believe that if you produce a great dramatist in a desert, people will find him somehow. There has always been an audience for serious drama on Broadway, like a starving man invited to a rare banquet. But to see the three Founding Fathers of American drama lighting up the marquees on Broadway again is an astonishing moment in modern theater history. And all three of their plays are about a tragedy of the American Dream.

The savage prison life of Tennessee Williams' newly discovered 1938  Not About Nightingales is as much a drama of lost souls as the self-deluding barflies are in O'Neill's 1939 The Iceman Cometh . And Iceman 's con-man evangelist Hickey, arguably the ultimate salesman in American theater, is surely a blood relative of Willy Loman, mythic failed salesman of the American Dream.

God protect me from Iceman ! The play scares me to death. I do not care for it–in the sense that one wouldn't care to have terrible suffocating nightmares. (But we have them, anyway.) Iceman stifles me and exhausts. It flattens us, as if crushed by some unstoppable boulder rolling over us, again and again, without mercy, save for minor compensation in the clamor of a drunken song.

It is said that one doesn't attend an O'Neill saga such as his Wagnerian 5-hour Strange Interlude ; one enlists for it. At 4 hours and 15 minutes, Howard Davies' production of The Iceman Cometh is testing enough. Worse! Here we have one of the masterworks of the century which at the same time is messily repetitive–well over 20 nagging references to its pipe dream theme, lest we miss the point. Its structure can be clumsy, dramatically telegraphed, ponderous. "Get over it, you long-winded bastard!" Harry Hope, the good-natured bar owner, shouts at Hickey telling his relentless story of his marriage, and we laugh to ourselves because we share his impatient protest.

The long evening (with two intermissions) has its inevitable tedium–as would the company of desperate flophouse drunks in any hellhole of a saloon. Yet for all its blatant rough edges that we sense O'Neill hammering obsessively into shape and imperfect form, Iceman is an overwhelming tragedy of self-delusion, as if God had gone missing along with salvation.

"What is it?" says Larry Slade sardonically, defining the lower depths they have all come to. "It's the No Chance Saloon. It's Bedrock Bar, the End of the Line Cafe, the Bottom of the Sea Rathskeller! Don't you notice the beautiful calm in the atmosphere? That's because it's the last harbor. No one here has to worry about where they're going next, because there is no farther they can go. It's a great comfort to them. Although even here they keep up the appearances of life with a few harmless pipe dreams about their yesterdays and tomorrows …"

Larry, the former romantic anarchist, has a nice line in bitter irony: "It's a great game, the pursuit of happiness." Iceman owes a debt to Maxim Gorki and Henrik Ibsen, but its dark humor of despair anticipates Samuel Beckett. After all, the habitués of "The Palace of Pipe Dreams" are waiting for Hickey, their unexpected Godot, or savior.

To their utter disbelief, Hickey arrives newly sober and reborn, an evangelist of temperance. He has seen the light! Hickey, the hardware salesman, sets out to sell salvation by persuading his old drinking buddies to face a boozeless reality without the illusions and pipe dreams of a better tomorrow. But Hickey himself, we learn, is living a terrible lie–he killed his wife–and the truth he's selling is death.

In effect, the revivalist Hickey is an Angel of Death. The drunks of the "No Chance Saloon" choose the half-life of comforting booze and self-delusion to the oblivion of sober reality. "All we want is to pass out in peace, bejees!" cries Harry Hope. But if that were all there is to Iceman , it wouldn't affect us so deeply in its hopelessness.

It is an awesomely dark play. O'Neill, via Hickey and his rock-bottom characters, is actually telling us that self-knowledge kills. It does not free us; it disgusts us. He is saying that even the emptiest illusions are preferable to facing the truth about ourselves. Life itself cannot be redeemed. Because life is unlivable.

Was ever a bleaker message delivered from the stage? It's why, with regrets, I can't regard the new Iceman production and Kevin Spacey's central performance as ecstatically as many others have. My regret is over the good intentions of everyone concerned. But I believe that Mr. Davies, the director, is mistaken in his belief that Iceman is essentially "funny." It is extraordinarily humane, but does it really flow from "a rich vein of humor," as he told The New York Times ?

I'd say its vein was of the blackest blood. Of course, there's humor in it, and the spiky camaraderie of washed-up drunks is a form of beleaguered brotherhood. But I believe the source of Iceman is in its pain. Mr. Davies, on the other hand, has said: "I knew from the start that what I wanted was a bunch of happy bums. I've always felt the play is very funny, and I cast it looking for actors with real comic skills."

It is as if the production has its own pipe dream–the illusion of an easier-to-digest tragedy. Was that why one or two of my colleagues were glad to note admiringly that the evening "flew by" (despite its length, of course)? Or why the audience found Iceman 's pathetic characters frequently amusing? Yet this young character at the bar, a betrayer, wants permission to kill himself; that aging one hasn't set foot outside since his wife died; he's a near mad mystic hoping to drink himself to death; and that deluded one believes he can begin life all over again.

The key to Iceman isn't in its humor, but in the Heinrich Heine poem to morphine that Larry Slade quotes:

Lo, sleep is good; better is death, sooth,

The best of all were never to be born.

The new production is compromised by its lightness–just as the entire ensemble uncannily looks the part of O'Neill's derelicts and Bowery bums, but the bar itself is too clean. Some of the performers play too broad. (The shrill stage hookers; Tony Danza's "typical" bartender, Rocky; Michael Emerson, the Oscar Wilde of Gross Indecency , too much of an actorly turn as the fallen Harvard lawyer.) Others in the 19-member cast are magnificent–Clarke Peters' scarily authentic black gambler, Tim Pigott-Smith's Larry Slade en route to schizophrenia, and James Hazeldine's tremendously sympathetic Harry Hope are three of the standouts in the committed cast.

I never saw Jason Robard's legendary Hickey and there are those who claim the role that belongs to him has now passed to Kevin Spacey. But for me, Mr. Spacey's performance is all on the slick surface of things. Perhaps this is the way with salesmen, and Mr. Spacey's fast talk has surely broken some world speed record. He understands Hickey's fake warmth and his coldness, possessing the eyes of an assassin. He is a slight, coiled figure–a dangerous glad-hander. But there is no variation in him, and no terror. In Hickey's

ultimate collapse and confession, Mr. Spacey's tears are too easy, not hard won. It is as if he's still selling himself to the end. Hickey's marathon final scene of overwhelming elemental emotion fails to touch us as it should in O'Neill's compassionate search for absolution.

The restaurant is in a small, attractive hotel called the Mayfair New York on West 49th Street. It is named after the 17th-century Shakespearean actor David Garrick, who founded a club called the Garrick in London. (Among its many illustrious members was the late Kingsley Amis, who was often to be found at the bar and once remarked that the saddest words in the English language were "Shall we go straight in?")

I first visited the Garrick on a Saturday with a friend and our two children for lunch, before a matinee of Annie Get Your Gun . We were immediately charmed by the look of the place. Both the lobby and the dining room have an intimate, clubby feel; their walls are paneled in cherrywood and hung with wonderful 1940's photographs of old movie stars such as Fred Astaire, Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, lent by the Museum of the City of New York (including a great one in the bathroom of a soulful-looking and very young Tallulah Bankhead). Perhaps it was the setting, but the customers looked out of the 40's, too. The dining room proper is long and narrow and feels a bit like the restaurant car on a train 50 years ago. It is rather too brightly lit (but they lowered the lights when we asked). The paneled walls are lined with brown leather banquettes and hung with plain mirrors and small lamps with frosted glass shades.

The food is an intriguing combination of Provençal cuisine and dishes from the 40's–oysters Rockefeller, clams casino and lobster thermidor. I had tasted chef David McKenty's cooking at Côte Sud, and before that at Pitchoune, Kokachin and Leda. I like his zesty Mediterranean touch. At lunch, despite the fact that the dining room was fairly empty, the service was excruciatingly slow. I ordered a spinach salad with pears and walnuts served with a Roquefort vinaigrette. It would have been excellent had I not come across a small foreign body lurking in it (not animal or vegetable, but mineral). The waitress brought me another salad–this time, even though I believe lightning doesn't strike twice, I opted for mesclun with goat cheese croutons.

"There will be no charge," she said as she set down the plate before me. "Enjoy your lunch."

"Enjoy your last lunch," whispered my son who was scowling into his plate. He had ordered crabcakes with wild rice salad and whatever he was doing to them, eating did not seem to be a part of it. "The wild rice tastes like a roasted Nutrigrain bar."

He was right. It was undercooked and chewy and the crabcakes didn't have much character, either. But my mesclun salad was beautifully seasoned and my friend's mussels and calamari, steamed in garlic, tomato and white wine broth, were terrific. So were the lemon-pepper linguine with scallops and clams, and the brick-roasted baby chicken with green beans, mushrooms and mashed potatoes flavored with roast garlic. We wound up with a creamy crème brûlée and chocolate pot de crème, which cost a lot less than the candy we bought later at the theater.

The following week, I returned in the evening for the Garrick's pretheater dinner, which sounded like a bargain–a three-course meal for $25–before Death of a Salesman . (It made sense to eat early since the play didn't get out until 11 o'clock.) I walked in behind a couple of bewildered-looking tourists who were dragging suitcases into the lobby. This time, a very different scene met my eyes. At the back of the lobby, tables spilled out of the dining room and were filled with theatergoers having dinner. We hung our coats on a peg and waited to be seated.

I remembered Mr. McKenty's delicious escargot pissaladière, one of my favorite dishes at Côte Sud, and ordered it to start. The puff pastry was a little bit gummy on this occasion, but the topping of garlicky snails, olives, caramelized onions and tomatoes was still great. The oysters Rockefeller were good, too, although rather rich, since they came under a thick layer of spinach, butter and cream.

Our main courses were also satisfying. Seared salmon fillet, served on braised red cabbage with green pea sauce, was perfectly cooked, the cabbage providing a pleasant foil for the richness of the fish. Braised lamb shank was falling off the bone, served with white bean and fennel purée, grilled vegetables and a sprightly juniper berry sauce. I also like the grilled rib eye steak which came with a mound of crisp, salted fries and béarnaise sauce. It's a fine deal on the pretheater menu, which includes many of Mr. McKenty's best dishes.

Service was swifter on this visit, so for dessert there was time for what one of the waiters described jocularly as "mille phooey," adding, "That's the extent of the French I speak." Its layers of puff pastry were filled with ice cream. They also serve a chocolate soufflé with dark and white Valhrona chocolate, but I didn't get to taste it because they brought the chocolate pot de crème by mistake and it was too late to wait.

A few minutes later, we sank into our seats at the theater, which was packed. As the curtain went up, a voice with a strong Brooklyn accent said: "My son should see this. Do you know he's still got the first dollar he ever made?"

The play is three hours long, but I balked at the idea of spending the entire intermission in line for the bathroom. So I pass along this little tip to you, dear reader. Just nip next door to the Garrick, where you can not only use the bathroom immediately, you will also have time for a drink at the bar. I think Kingsley Amis would have approved.

The Garrick

* 1/2

242 West 49th Street

489-8600

Dress: Casual

Noise level: Moderate

Wine list: Small selection, quite high prices

Credit cards: All major

Price range: Three-course, prix-fixe pretheater and Sunday-night dinner $25, dinner main courses $12 to $21

Breakfast: Tuesday to Saturday 7 A.M. to 10:30 A.M.

Lunch: Tuesday to Saturday noon to 3 P.M.

Dinner: Daily 5:30 P.M. to 11 P.M.

* Good

* * Very Good

* * * Excellent

* * * * Outstanding

No Star: Poor