STAGE WIRE : A LONG NIGHT’S JOURNEY INTO BRITISH ‘INTERLUDE’

If not our greatest playwright, Eugene O’Neill is certainly our longest playwright. “Strange Interlude,” for instance, clocks in at five hours. That didn’t stop it from being a hit in 1928, and a semi-hit when the Actors Studio revived it in 1963, with Geraldine Page. Now Glenda Jackson and a largely British cast have brought it to Broadway.

The reviews have been divided. Some critics found it a clumsy but strangely fascinating evening--Jackson adding to the fascination as O’Neill’s tortured heroine, Nina Leeds--and some dismissed it as a terrible play, period.

Clive Barnes in the Post asked: “How can a play so bad be so good? Or at least so utterly engrossing? This is a production, and these are performances that should not be missed.”

Michael Kuchwara of the Associated Press thought the play “not out of O’Neill’s top drawer” and even “ludicrous”--as in the scene when Nina aborts her baby (having discovered that insanity runs in her husband’s family) and immediately gets herself pregnant by another man.

But Kuchwara was impressed by O’Neill’s still-potent device of having the players voice their unspoken thoughts, especially when the thoughts are at variance with their official dialogue. The Times’ Frank Rich and the Daily News’ Douglas Watt thought that Jackson and Edward Petherbridge (as the prissiest of the males in Nina’s entourage) redeemed the show. But David Richards of the Washington Post thought it unredeemable.

On the play: “O’Neill wanted to introduce a sense of Greek fatality into the American drama, but fate clomps through ‘Strange Interlude’ like an oafish understudy before he’s mastered his lines. . . . “

On the star: “Like her Hedda Gabler, Jackson’s Nina always appears in control, even when her inner self is presumably racked by crippling desires. In time--of which there is an abundance--the thought occurs that Jackson doesn’t act; she sculpts performances in ice.”

Variety’s Richard Hummler couldn’t be that severe: “Under the verbose rhetoric and theorizing, the awkward exposition, there’s a genuine artistic voice that tried to illuminate life in ways that hadn’t been tried before. . . . “

Jackson versus O’Neill sounds like the battle of the season to us.

Speaking of marathons, “Nicholas Nickleby” is coming back. The Royal Shakespeare Company had resisted the temptation to do an American road tour of it, but has now decided to do just that, after a December ’85 tryout at Stratford-on-Avon.

This is part of the RSC’s plan to bring in more at the box office, in order to counter waning subsidies from the British Arts Council. Faced with the same problem, the National Theatre of Great Britain has announced that it will close its downstairs black-box theater, the Cottesloe, after this season.

It’s the same story in the U.S. Theatre Communications Group, the national organization for American resident theater, reports that attendance and income were up last year, but that costs were also up and government support was down, particularly from the National Endowment for the Arts. Result: “Deficits. Big, and getting bigger.”

QUOTE OF THE WEEK. Lynn Fontanne, the original Nina Leeds, before going on one night in “Strange Interlude”: “This is like giving birth--it isn’t worth it.”