By HOWARD TAUBMAN

More than 20 years after Eugene O’Neill wrote the play and more than 10 years after his death, “Hughie” has made it to an American stage.

Did O’Neill want “Hughie” performed? No one can say for certain. It was one of a batch of one-acters he planned in the early nineteen-forties, his first short pieces since those at this career’s beginnings. He destroyed the sketches for the others but left “Hughie.”

On the evidence of the production that opened last night at the Royale Theater as well as the printed text, “Hughie” is not only a short play (about an hour in length) but a small one. One would guess that the author, even if he liked what he had done, had grave doubts that it added anything to what he said with more penetration and richness of texture in “The Iceman Cometh.”

The theme of “Hughie” is one with which O’Neill wrestled again and again—the pathetic illusions men create for themselves to fill the glaring voids of their dreary lives. Here O’Neill treated it simply, directly, without ornament, and it emerges with a certain amount of pity. But essentially his play is too spare to sustain a sense of voyage and discovery. It is more like a mood piece and a character sketch than a drama.

O’Neill, of course, knew his characters—Erie Smith, the small-time Broadway hanger-on and spinner of wearily tall tales about himself; the bored night clerk and the departed and invisible Hughie, who had been the night clerk in this fleabag of a midtown New York hotel. Although “Hughie” is largely a monologue for Erie, the barrenness of Hughie’s and the current night clerk’s worlds is revealed as effectively as Erie’s.

Under José Quintero’s direction, Jason Robards does all that can be expected of him to ring the few changes available to Erie. From the moment he rolls into the lobby in the wee morning hours, we know that Erie is washed up. We scarcely need the documentation of the blue, unshaven chin, battered Panama and soled summer suit; there is a beaten look in Mr. Robards’s eyes and the camaraderie of his first words is patently put on.

Erie has been on a five-day drunk, mourning, he says, the loss of Hughie. His grief is for himself, for Hughie had been his sounding board, his flatterer, his looking glass that gave him the momentary reflection of the big shot he would have liked to be. His aim is to make this new night clerk serve him as another Hughie.

There is repetitiousness in Erie’s fraudulently gallant efforts to aggrandize himself. Mr. Robards, with Mr. Quintero’s help, conjures up swift, dark images of desolation—plucking a butt from an ashtray, leaning over suddenly to cough and spit, queasily swallowing a spoonful of food. But there is no tension in any of this.

There are moments of pathos as Mr. Robards, sitting at one side of the huge, drab lobby, and Jack Dodson as the night clerk behind his cage of a desk soliloquize of their emptiness as if isolated by a vast graveyard. Mr. Dodson hears, yet does not hear; he only wants to survive the endless night hours. Mr. Robards’s bragging and cajolery no longer hope for a target.

“Hughie” flares into a pale, desperate passion as Erie describes the floral horseshoe he provided for Hughie’s funeral. His cry that when he lost Hughie he lost his confidence brings a flash of dramatic urgency to the play. Mr. Robards makes this interlude poignant, and his pride and triumph at the end when the distant night clerk melts are affectingly conveyed.

But O’Neill’s final descriptive words that Erie’s “soul is purged of grief, his confidence restored” represent an author’s hope rather than a truth. For Erie’s soul, as it is revealed in “Hughie,” is preoccupied with self-pity rather than grief.

David Hays’s design of the wide, deserted spaces of the lobby makes a virtue out of what is fundamentally a hazard for a play of modest dimensions—the uncommon width of the stage. For a touch of realism there is an old-fashioned elevator shaft with a car that actually descends from the unseen upper floors. The noises of the street—the rumbling of the El, the sirens of ambulance and fire engine, the rattle of a nightstick on an iron railing—echo in the distance.

The mood of the indifferent city is suggested. So is the atmosphere of defeat in which a man struggles to cling to a transparent fantasy. But in “Hughie” O’Neill was sketching in small what he drew grandly elsewhere.