STAGE REVIEW : ‘INTERLUDE’ THAT GOES ON TOO LONG

NEW YORK —  When the elephant comes to town, everybody wants to see the elephant. This is the only way to explain the full house at Broadway’s Nederlander Theatre the other night for “Strange Interlude.”

Eugene O’Neill’s nine-act drama is indeed a behemoth, stretching from 6:30 to after 11 p.m. That makes it the longest and most expensive Broadway show ($50) since “Nicholas Nickleby.” Like “Nickleby,” it has a British cast, built around Glenda Jackson as O’Neill’s tortured femme fatale, Nina Leeds. “Jackson versus O’Neill sounds like the battle of the season to us,” wrote one West Coast reviewer, before seeing the show.

Forget it. This is one flat evening in the theater, a defeat for everyone involved, especially O’Neill. Rarely has a revival so successfully demonstrated that the play in question was beyond revival. It will be a long time before another theater takes “Strange Interlude” off the shelf.

O’Neill’s intention here was to combine the immediacy of theater with the novel’s power to get inside the minds of its characters. Everyone in the play voices his private thoughts, as well as speaking his assigned lines. Being painfully sincere people (even Nina), what they think might often just as well be dialogue, and is often directed by Keith Hack as if it were.

So “Strange Interlude” emerges as a ton of talk, even when the travails of Nina and her three men (James Hazeldine, Brian Cox and Edward Petherbridge) seem to promise fireworks. Rather than confronting one another, the characters tend to have conferences with each other, padded with notes to themselves.

Here is Nina, inspecting her retinue. “My three men! . . . I feel their desires converge in me! . . . I am pregnant with the three! . . . husband! . . . lover! . . . father! . . . and the fourth man! . . . little man! . . . little Gordon! . . . That makes it perfect! . . .” Nina, you should know, has had the name of Gordon on the brain ever since losing a sweetheart of that name in the Great War. Later she married good old reliable Sam (Hazeldine)--not realizing that there was insanity in the family. (Why his mother waits until Nina is pregnant to reveal this is not clear.)

But Sam needs a child. It will be the making of him. So Nina aborts Sam’s child and begins another one with the “scientific” Dr. Ned (Cox), who complicates things by falling in love with her. He will simply have to go away. But he keeps coming back. Meanwhile, Nina’s son (named after Gordon: This becomes a running gag in the show) is growing up, and even going out with girls.

Nina, the all-devouring, can’t

have that. But in the end young Gordon flies off in his own biplane, poor old Sam keels over with a stroke, grouchy Ned goes back to Bermuda and Nina settles down to a dotty old age with her epicene mentor (Petherbridge, in the play’s most delicate performance).

It’s a muted ending, but the surprise in this show is how seldom anybody raises his voice. Everyone seems quite reasonable and lucid, with Jackson in perfect control as Nina, even when she’s supposed to be distracted. “Strange Interlude” has never been served with more circumspection. Even when a particularly clunky passage brings laughs, the actors go on as if it had only been the wind in the chimney.

It’s as if they’re saying: Despite appearances, this is really a very respectable play. In point of fact, it isn’t. It’s an excessive play, and it needs some wildness in the playing to catch the megalomaniacal strain in the script. Too often at the Nederlander we wonder why such rational people don’t simply put a lid on it and get on with their lives.

Jackson’s strongest note as Nina is that of pure scorn for the rest of the human race, particularly the male half. Her “Oh, Mother God, grant that I may someday tell this fool the truth” is superb--her husband being the fool. But why would a woman this strong-minded allow herself to be talked into taking such a man in the first place? As with Jackson’s magnificent Hedda Gabler, the character seems too competent for the jam she is in.

Petherbridge is charming as Nina’s elegant mentor, an ineffectual, mother-dominated novelist who will obviously never think of Nina “in that way.” Hazeldine plays Sam as a likable dunce who has the brains never to peek behind appearances. Cox seems totally bored with the part of Ned, lapsing into a Scottish accent from time to time to see if anyone will notice.

I admired actress Elizabeth Lawrence’s gravity in the scene at the old homestead, when Sam’s mother reveals her Awful Secret. All that this scene needed was a bucket of confetti snow, but the audience heard it in moderate quiet. Walter Kerr asked in a recent Sunday New York Times article why people are laughing at this “Strange Interlude.” Because at that price, one is determined to get some pleasure out of the evening.

‘STRANGE INTERLUDE’ Eugene O’Neill’s drama, at the Nederlander Theatre, New York. Presented by Robert Michael Geisler, John Roberdeau, Douglas Urbanski, James M. Nederlander, in association with Duncan C. Weldon, Paul Gregg, Lionel Becker, Jerome Minskoff. Director Keith Hack. Setting Voytek and Michael Levine. Costumes Deirdre Clancy. Light Allen Lee Hughes. Music Benedict Mason. Sound Valerie Spradling. Casting Hughes/Moss. General management Kingwill & Goosen. Production stage manager Jane E. Neufeld. With Jane Fleiss, Edward Petherbridge, Tom Aldredge, Glenda Jackson, Brian Cox, James Hazeldine, Caitlin Clarke, Charley Lang. Plays Tuesday-Saturday at 6:30 p.m., Sunday at 2. Tickets: $50. 208 West 41st St. (212) 921-8000.