Ric Burns completely makes up the best parts of his new documentary on Eugene O'Neill. Rest assured, the film, which aired on March 27 on PBS as part of the American Experience series produced by WGBH in Boston, presents all the familiar pieties regarding this country's greatest playwright: the difficult circumstances of his birth, extreme loneliness, tortured family life, dissipation, attempted suicide, several wives, experimental plays, Pulitzer Prizes, at last the Nobel, and finally a posthumous renaissance. Remarkably, though, the less than two-hour film races through these facts in order to focus at length upon two masterpieces written near the end of his career, The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's Journey into Night. Burns's film tells the unique story of a dramatist who wrote his greatest work after receiving the equivalent of a lifetime achievement award. Among all the possible narratives to choose regarding O'Neill, Burns picks a singularly awesome story, gathers an impressive cast to tell it, and shoots it in such a fresh, daring and innovative way that an audience experiences the intensity of a great theatrical performance through the intimacy of the camera.

"What does it cost to be an artist?" asks Lloyd Richards in the opening frames, before even the title of the film is announced. Among the casualties, he lists a brother, a father, a mother, marriages, children, and eventually his own health. It cost O'Neill his life, says Barbara Gelb, who co-wrote the film along with her husband, Arthur, and Mr. Burns. She goes on to quote Tennessee Williams, who once proclaimed, dramatically, "O'Neill gave birth to the American Theater—and died for it." There was no American theater before Eugene O'Neill, asserts playwright John Guare early in the film. Acting alone, the story goes, O'Neill created modern drama in America.

O'Neill with his second of three wives, Agnes, and their later disinherited son Shane on a beach on Cape Cod. Courtesy of George Meredith.

Eugene O'Neill married his third wife, actress Carlotta Monterey, in 1929. In the winter of 1937, the pair settled into Tao House, an isolated mountain retreat in Danville, California, where he would write three of the greatest plays ever written by an American. Photo credit: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

O'Neill desired to be "an artist or nothing," as he wrote in a rather obsequious letter seeking admission to George Pierce Baker's playwriting class at Harvard in 1914. A portrait of the artist emerges—tall, dark and handsome in every photograph—with deep, burning, penetrating eyes, decked out appropriately in his American Line jersey, or an undershirt to reveal his tanned swimmer's torso, or later, an immaculately tailored Brooks Brothers suit. He is always the perfect picture of what one might conjure as "Artist." His loneliness, reserve, hours spent looking out to sea or reading alone, later going to sea, and time spent drinking himself to death burnishes the image and photos of the dive where he made a failed suicide attempt provide final proof of his artistic temperament.

O'Neill lived a very dramatic life through exceedingly dramatic times, bridging the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, spanning two world wars, living on two continents, Bermuda, and both coasts of the United States, in fascinating dwellings such as an abandoned life saving station at Provincetown, a chateau in France, Casa Genotta in Sea Island, Georgia, and Tao House in Danville, California. He was born in a hotel in New York City in 1888 in what is now Times Square, the heart of today's theatrical district. Sixty-five years later, having outlived his celebrity and success, he resided and eventually died at the Shelton Hotel in Boston. Sensing the irony of an Oedipal fate, he said, in the end, "Born in a hotel, and god dam it, died in a hotel."

The subject of many thick and fascinating biographies, so rich that the Gelbs have expanded and completely rewritten their 1962 classic into separate volumes, O'Neill's relationships sparked dramatic interest as well: his father was a famous actor; his mother became a drug addict on the occasion of his difficult birth; his brother, Jamie, drank himself to death at the age of 45. O'Neill did his best to do the same, but stopped eventually at a much younger age. He knew John Reed at Provincetown and had a tumultuous affair with Reed's wife, Louise Bryant. He abandoned two wives and three children, two of whom eventually committed suicide and the third, Oona, he disinherited after she married Charlie Chaplin against his wishes. O'Neill himself finally achieved a measure of stability during the last twenty-five years of his life after he ran away with and eventually married the exotic Carlotta Monterey, who dedicated her life to serving his genius. Still, a myriad of health problems beset him until he could no longer physically control even a pencil. He wrote nothing during the last ten years of his life.

The facts of O'Neill's life are relatively easy to present and the film does this expertly, if conventionally, by the high standards of Mr. Burns's previous work. Historical film footage of the O'Neills in California is a treat to see. Clips from the film version of James O'Neill's big moneymaker, Monte Cristo, provide a glimpse of the theatrical inheritance bequeathed to O'Neill and the melodramatic tradition against which he rebelled. Staged shots of a hypodermic needle and bottles of morphine are chilling, and a short sequence of Vanessa Redgrave from the recent Broadway production of Long Day's Journey into Night displays the dramatic power and horror of Ella O'Neill's drug addiction. A voiceover describes the death of Eugene's older brother, Edmund, due to measles, probably contracted from Jamie, while the camera focuses on an almost still life scene of a bassinet next to a bed. Many such shots inside Monte Cristo Cottage in New London, Connecticut, all without people, convey the sense of loneliness within that household and the confining walls that bound its inhabitants together. Exterior shots of that same house as it is preserved today, juxtaposed with vintage black/white photographs, dramatize the passing of time. Contemporary footage of the beach and ocean capture the water's pull upon the playwright. The technique of panning the camera across the old photographs gives a sense of movement and progression, while the emotional, musical score by Brian Keane playing throughout the film heightens dramatic effectiveness.

In addition to the Gelbs, Richards and Guare, Burns gathers a notable ensemble of "talking heads" that includes scholar Edward Shaughnessy, director and critic Robert Brustein, filmmaker Sydney Lumet, playwright Tony Kushner and producer Robert Whitehead, all of whom speak articulately and insightfully about the lasting significance of O'Neill's work. The mellifluous narration of Christopher Plummer ties the entire presentation together in tones of personal suffering and deep commitment to art.

If this were all the film were to present, it would be good, but hardly great. Like O'Neill, though, the film transcends inherent limitations to achieve something profound and lasting. Even from the outset the film counters the story that it purports to tell when Richards, on the heels of his first question, allows that most people who have suffered through a traumatic childhood and lived through terrible circumstances do not go on to become great artists. Quite simply, not everyone can turn personal experience into art. The film flirts with the question of whether O'Neill was a great artist because of his personal demons and afflictions, or in spite of them? Initially, the film seems to side affirmatively with the former, but actually, and quite a bit more interestingly, suggests the latter as it progresses.

O'Neill, Lloyd Richards says, would have been a lousy husband, wayward son, and awful father even if he had not been an artist. His great public art, however, ultimately redeems personal failing. Tony Kushner calls O'Neill our Shakespeare and compares the arc of their writing careers favorably, citing that their last works numbered among their best, an extreme rarity in the arts. Kushner stops there, but it's worth noting that Shakespeare is a prime example, sine qua non, of personal angst and suffering not being required to create great art. There is no evidence at all that Shakespeare had an unhappy life. That the Bard of Avon lived such a normal and relatively well-adjusted middle-class life is reason enough for many to doubt that he wrote his great plays, attributing them, instead, to the likes of Christopher Marlowe (who had his share of problems).

Kushner, one of the most charismatic and dynamic of O'Neill champions in the film, hints that O'Neill might have been playing the part of the tortured artist a little bit through all of those dramatic photographs. He was the son of an actor, Kushner reminds the audience, and he knew how to look haunted. The stage was his legacy and theater is the perfect medium for a writer who deals in constructed identities and the need for illusion, almost any illusion, in order to survive. Might the suffering artist have been a role that O'Neill fashioned for himself as a way to cope with the public scrutiny and acclaim that he always abhorred?

Refreshingly, this documentary film is not very interested with the public persona of the artist, or even his private persona, or any of the works that garnered attention and awards during the playwright's lifetime. The film only begins after the artist reaches the end of the road, after winning the Nobel Prize in 1936, after withdrawing from public view, after the failure of Days Without End, after nearly dying in an Oakland hospital, after moving into a new house that he thought to be his last, after his 50th birthday, when he looked and felt much older than that, after his health entered a period of steady decline, after having written over 40 plays, after having been a playwright for over 20 years, after all this, only then did O'Neill sit down to write his greatest works within a five year period that would eventually restore his reputation posthumously. At the exact time when he was considered a washed-up has-been, he was busy creating his best works in the seclusion and privacy of his California home. This is the significant fact of O'Neill's career; the absolute proof of his artistic credo that struggle gives life its meaning and significance. The dramatic problem for Burns, though, is how to show that which can't be seen?

O'Neill presents a mystery that cannot really be solved. Burns's documentary feints at an answer. The narrative of the film suggests by virtue of the chronology of O'Neill's career, and Sydney Lumet states, that O'Neill's greatest plays were always there inside him and that he chipped away at the artifice to get to the emotional truth of his life. Again, Richards, at the very beginning, says that the truth is hard and that it is difficult to reach. At the halfway point in the film, John Guare compares the late, great plays with the earlier big plays and notices O'Neill's change of technique in which the final plays are simple plays that do away with boldly experimental techniques such as beating tom-toms, masks, split characters, and Greek models of tragedy. The pared down works are more mature and sure of themselves, more confident works. Robert Brustein, who believes that the final plays are the only good ones O'Neill wrote, maintains that in the last plays O'Neill proved to himself that he was not a pseudo genius. The narration, too, claims that perhaps no artist ever took so long to discover where his true talents lay.

These commentaries build a case for something as perfectly natural as that old homily, practice makes perfect. That's fine, of course, but it never really occurs. With the possible exception of Shakespeare, who let's not forget wrote Hamlet and King Lear in the prime of his career, there is no other playwright who saved his best for last. The explanations by the experts, while they seem reasonable enough, belie the fact that no one else in the history of literature has trod such a lonely path as O'Neill. And, the simple fact is, only his deteriorating health kept O'Neill from writing much more. Thanks in part to the research of Virginia Floyd, O'Neill's plans and outlines for many more plays beyond A Moon for the Misbegotten, his last play, have come to light. Some of them sound strange indeed, not at all in the family vein of his previous great plays. Would they have surpassed the artistic heights of the ones recognized today as his best?

At the beginning of the film, the narrator gives notice that O'Neill wrote three masterpieces at Tao House, but the film only briefly mentions A Moon for the Misbegotten. Instead, the film focuses intently only upon two plays, The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's Journey into Night, both written in isolation, two of the greatest American plays ever written and which confer significance upon all of O'Neill's previous work. The former play received only a lukewarm production and reception in 1946, seven years after he wrote it. Long Day's Journey, the New London family play, was never performed or even published, per the playwright's wishes, during his lifetime. Yet, he acknowledged to himself that these plays were great. Among the other Tao House plays, only A Moon for the Misbegotten was performed, but it closed out of town in St. Louis. Neither Hughie, a short, brilliant gem of a play, nor A Touch of the Poet, the only play amongst O'Neill's immense cycle plays of American history to be completed, was ever staged during the playwright's lifetime. O'Neill had no audience except himself. Where's the drama here?

Burns's decision to film at the scene of the writing inside Tao House is fascinating precisely because it cannot solve the mystery it stages. Seeing the great man's room adds potency to the mystery: a desk like any other, a chair like any other—a pleasant seat—a photo of the playwright with a burning cigarette in hand, replete in a pinstriped suit—he could be an investment banker going over a client's portfolio. Indeed, the books in the case seem to be arranged according to height and volume, for cosmetic purposes, as opposed to any aligned content.

One directorial touch deserves special comment among all the Tao House scenes. As a recurring transition device, a red lacquered interior door opens to allow the viewer a peek down the hallway to O'Neill's desk, a smart homage to Travis Bogard's wonderful book, Contour in Time. Bogard calls his last chapter, in which he discusses the final plays, "The Door and the Mirror," and he chronicles O'Neill's retreat from the world to write these last plays as well as the importance of doors as scenic elements in A Touch of the Poet, Hughie, More Stately Mansions, and The Iceman Cometh, all plays in which the "action centers on the movement of a central character through a door that connects a painful, hopeless world-in-time to a Nirvana of drifting illusion" (371). Showing the red door open onto the small connecting hallway to O'Neill's office dramatizes what Bogard describes as O'Neill's struggle to write the last plays:

Between the two spaces of his isolation, the room of mirrors and the room of shadows, there stood a door he contemplated obsessively. From the outer room, it opened the way to peace and forgetfulness and the end of effort. Behind it, war did not exist, nor illness. What trouble could there be among the waiting shadows? From the inner room, the door was the only escape from a loneliness so intense it seemed like madness, from fantasies like Furies, from the hell he found inside himself. In his last years, he walked compulsively back and forth from outer to inner room, through the door which became in the end more than a metaphor. (371)

Shown without comment or explanation, the images of the red door communicate with pictures what Bogard does above with words.

Instead of explaining why the plays are great and deserve the attention of audience's today, Burns elects to show why they're great by allowing O'Neill to speak for himself. He actually includes a recording of the playwright reading Edmund's lines from Long Day's Journey into Night in act 4. That's interesting on account of who's talking, but it does not have independent dramatic power. For that, Burns directs professional actors in a series of separate readings from act 4 of the family play with Robert Sean Leonard as Edmund ("It was a great mistake, my being born a man" [812]), Liam Neeson as Jamie ("think of me as dead" [821]), Zoe Caldwell as Mary ("What did I come here to find?" [825], and Christopher Plummer as Tyrone ("Whose play is it?" [806]). And, from the other great play, Al Pacino in the role of Hickey ("I even caught myself hating her for making me hate myself so much" [699]) delivers the great confession in the final act of The Iceman Cometh. Burns presents snippets from all of these scenes in the first 15 minutes of his film and thus provides a glimpse of the film's direction and foreshadows what's to come in the second half.

After introducing the theme of his film and building up the expectations of what is to follow, Burns covers his documentary bases by presenting the chronology of O'Neill's career, from Times Square to Tao House, with particular emphasis upon his childhood and immediate family. After showing a photograph of Jimmy-the-Priest's on New York's Lower East Side, the film changes tone and approach abruptly in accord with O'Neill's subsequent rebirth and decision to become a playwright. Following O'Neill's decision to write, the salacious aspects of O'Neill's life drop away and the film focuses almost exclusively upon his art for its entire duration. His frolics at Provincetown go without mention. There is very little said about his children and their unhappy lives. There's little fanfare given to his affair with Carlotta. The only thing that matters to the film is O'Neill's writing. And this seems right since apparently that was all that mattered to O'Neill. He gave up drinking in order to write. He wrote in order to survive.

Despite the shift away from personal biography to the work itself, O'Neill's early efforts and his successes, particularly the works that made him famous and financially stable in the 1920s, the works that earned him three Pulitzer Prizes and a Nobel Prize on the heels of Mourning Becomes Electra, get short shrift. The viewer who expects to learn more about Desire Under the Elms or Dynamo will be greatly disappointed. Remarkably, Burns shoots through the heart of O'Neill's career in about 15 minutes, mirroring the speed at which O'Neill took the commercial theater by storm between 1920 and 1934, a period in which he produced 18 plays in 14 years, beginning with his first big success and Pulitzer Prize-winning Beyond the Horizon, and concluding with Days Without End.

Covering this fervent period when O'Neill couldn't get his experimental techniques and big ideas down on paper fast enough, Burns doesn't leave much out, exactly, but he moves rapidly from play to play. Liam Neeson reads a few lines as Mat Burke along with Natasha Richardson in "Anna Christie." Production photographs display the expressionist techniques in The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape. Another photograph of Paul Robeson and Mary Blair in All God's Chillun Got Wings stages the brewing controversy of that time when a black man kissing a white woman's hand caused uproar. Arthur Gelb describes how the entire plot of Desire Under the Elms came to O'Neill in a dream. The narrator recites a beautiful passage from Lazarus Laughed on theater and illusion. Billy Brown sits staring at his mask held at arm's length in a photograph from The Great God Brown. Images from Dynamo and Days Without End convey the power of Lee Simonson's stage designs. Strange Interlude, the Freudian epic, described by its first star Alfred Lunt as a "nine hour bisexual race," is described in the film only in terms of its tremendous financial success, the greatest of O'Neill's career. Ah, Wilderness!, O'Neill's lone comedy, is featured only with a fancifully romantic poster from the original production.

Having documented the entire public career of O'Neill in less than an hour of the film, Burns spends the entire second hour upon O'Neill's final five years of writing, but only two plays, The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's Journey into Night. Pausing to show O'Neill near death in a California hospital (again looking haunted in bed), Robert Brustein comments that O'Neill hibernated to write the best plays of his life. Just as O'Neill vowed to live as an artist after his failed suicide attempt in 1912, he re-dedicated himself to his work after he almost died in 1937.

There may be critics who assail the filmmaker for his out-of-balance treatment of America's greatest playwright. Why couldn't there be more time allotted, they might say, to the early sea plays and those Provincetown days, and interesting plays such as Diff'rent? Perhaps if the film were twice as long more attention could be paid to earlier lesser-known works. The fact is, though, that this film succeeds not in spite of its limitations, but because of them. How can a documentary adequately cover the enormous career of an artist such as Eugene O'Neill? It is an impossible task that forces the filmmaker to edit material.

Before even moving into Tao House, O'Neill had been hard at work on his elaborate eleven-play cycle of American history. It is a great tragedy that he couldn't finish this cycle. The film points out that at a certain point, O'Neill determined that he didn't have the strength to complete that grand work. Instead, he turned his attention to what he could complete before his health gave out completely. And, then, he wrote his best work. What if he had never written those last works? Brustein states, and the film agrees with him, that O'Neill would be a noted but not necessarily revered playwright today. His plays in the professional repertory in this country today mostly number among those last five great plays and performances of those plays keep O'Neill alive in the newspapers and classrooms across the country.

Like O'Neill, Burns makes his decision about what he can do within the persistent constraints of time and budget. By focusing on O'Neill's best work, Burns puts the playwright in the best possible light and buys time to probe deeply and not just skim the surface. After racing through the bulk of O'Neill's career, Burns slows down in the last half and brings the artist to the viewer's attention with quiet care and enormous patience and attention to detail. By lovingly exploring the details of O'Neill's great works, the film encourages the viewer to learn more about the playwright, to look back, to study what has been mentioned earlier but not shown in detail. In assessing an artist's work, it's normal to catch the future in the instant, but O'Neill works time in reverse. The late plays, in which early experimental techniques are not exactly abandoned but internalized, modified, and blended into a seamless fabric, make the early works more understandable and interesting as well. Burns presents this clearly with original performances that are unlike anything that anyone has seen previously. Burns makes everything that is old look new again.

As the story of O'Neill unfolds, so, too, does the story of the American theater in the twentieth century, and this is not necessarily because they are one and the same. Burns's impressive list of experts gather to talk about O'Neill, but, in turn, they all have distinguished careers beyond O'Neill. O'Neill appears much more significant, for example, after Lloyd Richards and Robert Brustein, who often sparred against each other from their respective perches at Yale and Harvard, praise him. Richards, of course, was also the notable director of the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut, as well as the principal director of the late August Wilson, whose own cycle of plays detailing the lives of African Americans in the twentieth century has been compared justifiably to the stature and scope of O'Neill's plays. Brustein included O'Neill among rebel playwrights such as Ibsen and Chekhov and Brecht in his brilliant, still-in-print- volume on the modern stage, The Theatre of Revolt (1964). Until only recently, Brustein ran one of the leading non-profit and often avant-garde theaters, the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and for years he has been an important voice in the theater as a critic at the New Republic. In talking about O'Neill, these leaders of the American theater bring all of their own artistic sensibilities together in one program in ways that most likely will never be assembled again.

Film is inherently nostalgic, always capturing the past tense and bringing it back to life. The story of O'Neill, as Burns tells it, is a man trapped alone with his memories of the past at Tao House and slowly confronting those memories and bringing them to life in memorable plays. The film, too, brings beloved artists and colleagues back to life: featured speakers include actor Jason Robards, scholar Edward Shaughnessy, and producer Robert Whitehead, all of whom have died since recording their respective moments. It's poignant to see Robards, near the end of his life, blaze with fire in his eyes and passion in his voice as he talks about O'Neill. Burns chooses not to have Robards read from any of his famous parts. Perhaps he was not well enough to do so. Instead, he shows one short clip of him as Hickey in the made-for-television version of the play. He does, however, present many photographs of the famous productions, one of the best of which is Robards as Jamie comically pursing his lips around his raised glass as if to suck the last possible drop of booze from the tumbler. The fact that 2006 marks the 50th anniversary of that play, along with the great Quintero revival of Iceman starring Robards, the production that brought O'Neill back to prominence and began a renaissance that has not abated to this day, goes unmentioned in the film. The visual reminder of then and now, a technique only possible in the film medium, says it all. The ravages of time can be seen on the actor's face, but when Robards recalls the opening night curtain call of Long Day's Journey, amplified only by the soundtrack of handclapping to support his recollections, it is as if he were talking about last night and not 50 years ago.

Legendary producer Robert Whitehead, who, like Robards, was evidently not well when he was filmed, and who also died in 2002, perseveres to speak beautifully about O'Neill. Noted for being a classy gentleman and a man of elegance and taste, Mr. Whitehead was the last of the great commercial producers, according to Mel Gussow, after the deaths of David Merrick and Alexander Cohen. Speaking on O'Neill, Mr. Whitehead says that the playwright didn't compromise, spoke the deadly truth, and that his work will be there forever. Ed Shaughnessy, who died in 2004, leaving his fellow scholars and colleagues much too soon, talks about O'Neill and his life and says that one can't always put life together and finish it as one likes. Art, however, is different, and Shaughnessy claims that O'Neill finishes his family story for all time in Long Day's Journey into Night. Monuments of the ages, Shaughnessy quotes Yeats, but he speaks about much more than O'Neill's work, but also about the professional luminaries brought together to extol O'Neill in this documentary.

After the film ends, during the credits, as the names scroll down the screen, the camera focuses through the type over the shoulder of a man doing a sketch. Despite never focusing on the face of the artist, the emerging style indicates quite early that this is Al Hirschfeld, recreating one of his famous sketches of O'Neill before the viewer's eyes. It is a brilliant ending, one that adds levity to all the preceding drama. Here's O'Neill, arms folded, eyes bulging, evidently harboring his deep and dark "genius" thoughts. The funny pencil strokes draw the final rebuke of the "tortured artist" syndrome that seemed to pervade the early frames of the movie. If O'Neill really did strike a pose in his earlier years to look haunted like an artist, along comes Hirschfeld at the end to poke fun at that stance. Of course, caricature through the care of Al Hirschfield confers status and legitimates the subject. The recent death of Mr. Hirschfeld, too, signifies the end of an era of Broadway Theater and coverage of it in the New York Times. The passing of Robards, Whitehead, and Hirschfield gives sufficient cause to lament, "Who will come next to fill the void?"

Fortunately, Mr. Burns gives ample reason to think that O'Neill will thrive in the years to come. As much as the film celebrates the past and those who built the American theater, the film creates also an image of O'Neill's work to excite new audiences. Given that the film focuses on O'Neill's writing and not so much on his life, the challenge remains to make that work come alive. The camera focuses in close-ups at various junctures on the typescripts of The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's Journey into Night as well as handwritten pages in which he crammed, in the late stages of his career, over a 1,000 words on a single page. It's fascinating to see the pages with cross-outs and other revisions as well as the stage groundplan he penciled for Iceman. Still, this technique hardly brings the works to life. For that, Burns needs actors and performances. And it poses the biggest question he faces in the film: how to translate theatrical performances into equally powerful film performances? The answer to that question is not as simple or obvious as it might seem, although the brilliant solution that Burns arrive at is the essence of simplicity.

If O'Neill were a filmmaker, clips of his work could sample his work. If he were a painter, then Burns could show his canvasses. It would not be the same as seeing them in person, of course, but the viewer could at least see what the experts were talking about and gain an approximation of the art. Similarly, if O'Neill were a composer or a musician, the filmmaker could produce recordings of the works and an audience could listen and evaluate them. If O'Neill were a sculptor, viewers would lose the context of seeing the work in dimensional space by seeing it on film, but, unlike a photograph of sculpture, the camera could move around the object and capture its image almost simultaneously from multiple perspectives. If O'Neill were a poet or a novelist, it might be impossible to take in the entire work within the constraints of the film, particularly if the novel were long, but it would be possible to hear the words spoken and see them arranged on the printed page, the finished form of the art, and it might be possible therefore to get a sense of the whole work by examining only a part of it.

What to do with a dramatist, then, who combines all of the above arts but is not any single one of them. Despite O'Neill's own anti-theatrical prejudice and his deference to the reading public, plays are written to be performed. They may occur in the theater of one's own mind, but they do still unfold in time and space. They suggest bodies moving in space around other bodies and scenic elements, wearing costumes, wielding props, talking, gesturing, singing; the text unfolds rhythmically in terms of space, time, and movement, forming a kind of great musical score even without music per se. How can a filmmaker capture this within the medium of film?

The two most obvious answers are either to film a stage play or scenes from a play or to show clips from actual film adaptations of plays. Even though Sydney Lumet is one of the distinguished experts in Burns's film, the director of the made-for-television production of The Iceman Cometh as well as the1962 film version of Long Day's Journey into Night, starring Ralph Richardson, Katharine Hepburn, Robards and Dean Stockwell, there is only a short showcase of Robards in the former and nothing at all from the latter. And that is certainly one of the better screen adaptations. On the whole, O'Neill certainly didn't like most of the movies made from his plays and, after a while, stopped seeing them altogether. O'Neill famously rejected the Hollywood hokum that made its appeal to mass audiences and didn't cotton, either, to alterations made in his plays to accommodate the screen. While O'Neill objected to the way his plays were handled by the film industry, and later sold them just for money with no expectations for any kind of artistic success, the actual problem of O'Neill, or any stage drama on film for that matter, is not just a matter of artistic taste and commercial appetite. The problem lies within the differences between methods of construction of the respective media.

The stage is all the world in the cinema. The camera can venture almost anywhere and the technique of cutting and editing allows a scene to go first here, then there, completely altering perceptions of time and space, but doing so in such a seamless and by now conventional manner that the shifts seem normal. A consequence of seeing the world through a camera is that the viewer only sees that at which the director points the lens. Moreover, the frame of each individual shot, the border of which demarcates what's in and what's out, the seen and the unseen, is only a partial view of an entire picture. The establishing shot, taken at some remove, may provide an initial context for a scene, but the bulk of the shots are usually much more intimate. It's fairly rare, for example, to see an entire human figure from head to toe in the frame of a film or television show. Instead, the viewer is much more likely to see performers from the knees up, or the waist up, or the neck up. This doesn't bother the viewer because of the common assumption that everything is contingent in film. The point of view can change in a split second to see a scene from a completely different angle, but the viewer never sees everything in its entirety, but always imagines what's not there and doesn't find that process strange at all. Rooted in photography, film trades on the impulse to see what's outside the frame of the shot. Like a good photograph, a film shot is often interesting on the basis of what's in the picture, but also what's not seen, what's hinted at, what's partially visible, what might be lurking just outside the frame, which might become apparent as the film moves, frame by frame, to its progressive, narrative end. The thriller genre works in film because the viewer fears at any moment that something, the killer, the bad guy, will leap into the next frame.

There's no such thing as a thriller in the theater. There is no fear that something is going to jump out and scare the viewer. The world is all a stage and that's all there is—a raised platform outlining a homogenous space upon which all the action takes place. There is no movement from here to there through the power of editing. The only transformations are those taking place in front of the audience's eyes or perhaps in its collective imagination. While everything is contingent in a film, theater thrives upon whole-bodied presence and the pleasures of seeing the human body interact with other bodies in time and space before an audience. Unlike the film, too, which forces the audience to see through the director's eyes, changing perspectives, perhaps, but only as much as the camera dictates, the theatrical audience sits in one place and sees the drama frontally, perhaps, but can visually roam across the entire stage, taking delight in anything that gives pleasure. The film works on narrative sequence, shot by shot, frame by frame, and an audience interprets a film by relating one shot to the next. Theater, on the other hand, offers everything at once, spread across a visual field, and the audience interprets the various bodies, scenery, costumes, language, and music simultaneously.

Simply to film a stage play and offer that as a substitute for the real thing works neither as a film nor as a representation of theater. Such recorded performances, and there are many of them, serve only to document that a live event took place once at a certain theater, but they don't do much more than that. They are not art. As soon as the tight frame of film or television fits around a theatrical performance, it begins to die for lack of air to breathe. Unlike a film, reliant upon technology and mechanization, theater needs space in order to resonate powerfully. Theater is often referred to as an intimate experience, but it needs distance far more than proximity to an audience. While a camera probes a scene and moves close to that which it films and records, stage actors project their performances in space toward the audience. An actor's performance fills a theatrical space physically, vocally. People are derisively called histrionic when their behavior is too dramatic, gestures too large, voices too loud, emotions too raw, for the context of daily life offstage. That same behavior onstage might seem perfectly reasonable within the context of a dramatic play and the distance of the audience from the stage. But, again, filming that same behavior for the screen draws a box around the human figure and suddenly the actor seems inappropriate again. Furthermore, the individual shots divide the actor from the context of a scene. A stage performance is geared to present everything in view simultaneously. A filmed performance of a stage play is necessarily broken into a series of shots that break up the context of the dramatic power of the stage. There is something dramatically powerful, for example, as Peter Brook has often said, about seeing an actor alone on a bare stage. The size of the stage, the actor in whole-bodied presence and vulnerability, creates existential overtones and allows the audience to think about what it is to be a human being. Such moments are about as close to the film close-up as the stage can ever get.

The solution Ric Burns comes up with to solve the problem of filming O'Neill is about as unassuming and non-dramatic as anyone could possibly imagine. Burns doesn't try to recreate scenes from past stage productions. And he doesn't film scenes as if they were movies with a lot of fancy camera work, angles and lighting effects, and editing. Instead he presents something quite different and quite radical, really, in terms of its bold simplicity. What he does is to gather excellent actors and allow them to read the O'Neill texts as he trains the camera upon them as they read. Surprisingly, breathtakingly, the texts come alive in the voices of excellent actors and the scenes from the two great plays are extremely powerful. The camera, in effect, doesn't do much differently than when it trained upon Richards, or Guare, or Brustein, the non-acting experts. The only difference is time spent on the subjects. Burns gets very close to the actors and simply turns the camera on them and lets the actors do their thing. There is no camera movement. There is no evident artifice at work. Yet Burns draws out extraordinary and original performances from his pool of actors.

All, with the exception of Christopher Plummer and Robert Sean Leonard, who recently played the part of Edmund on Broadway, refer to scripts in hand. But to call what the actors do reading would be a naïve understatement. The presence of the script visually reminds the audience that the actors are speaking the words of Eugene O'Neill. The script in the scenes keeps Eugene O'Neill in the audience's consciousness. Like the still camera, too, the script in hand device is a technique to quiet the scene so that all of the focus is upon the words and the emotional states behind the words. Because the camera is so close, because the actor's face completely fills the screen, the audience gains access to the emotional state of the actor in a way that has never quite been seen. Unlike a regular film, too, which tends to shy away from staying with a single shot too long, the fixation upon the actor in scenes creates intensity. A change of mood, at such distance, creates a huge physical response; such is the proximity of the actor to the camera. Unlike a traditional film, too, in which the camera probes a scene, the stationary camera allows the actor to project toward it, as if the stationary position of the camera created its own proscenium frame, almost completely filled by the actor's face, whose intensity threatens to break through the plane and grab hold of the viewer. Filming at close range fills up the screen effectively and translates the intensity of theater into a dynamic film event.

Eugene O'Neill brings to life The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's Journey into Night with scenes performed especially for the film by some of the most gifted actors working in theater today. Top, Al Pacino as Theodore (Hickey) Hickman; bottom, Christopher Plummer as James Tyrone. Photos courtesy of Steeplechase Films.

The performances of Pacino as Hickey and Plummer as Tyrone stand out as the best of the bunch. The brief encounters at the start of the film allow the audience to anticipate what they deliver in force during the last half of the film. Pacino, of course, played Erie Smith in Hughie ten years ago, and the role of the traveling salesman seems tailor made for him. He actually underplays the defining moment of realization, when Hickey hears what he has just said about his dead wife, when he realizes that he killed her because he hated her, not out of love, but hatred, and then begins to cover it up by claiming insanity. Pacino takes his time through this passage and allows the silences to fill the thoughts of the character and to spur the imaginations of the audience. The whole play happens in these moments and Pacino, as well as the camera trained upon his every facial tic, patiently allows the realization, revulsion, and the dawn of a new plan, a coverup, to unfold in rapid succession. One sees this performance and wishes to see Pacino in the part in a fully staged production.

Likewise, Christopher Plummer, with his grand stature and matinee idol looks, still in good form after all these years, and impeccable speech, seems typecast as James Tyrone, yet it is astonishing to discover that he has never acted in any O'Neill play previously. He brings the full tragedy of James O'Neill to life as he tries to remember exactly why he settled for money so easily, when all he really wanted to do was to act in Shakespeare's plays. Plummer playing cards from act 4 and looking as if he were sitting directly across from the viewer, his opponent, fights against his deep emotions of regret and remorse as he recounts his career and tries to convince Edmund, his unseen partner, who is really us, the viewer, that he could have been a great actor, that he once was a great actor. He reveals, intimately, the secret of his soul and what makes him who he is, then brushes it all off with the shuffle of the cards at the end, saying, "Well, it's a late day for regrets."

"I felt alive in Shakespeare's great poetry," Plummer as Tyrone proudly asserts. What Pacino, Plummer, Zoe Caldwell, Liam Neeson, and Robert Sean Leonard do in Mr. Burns's film is allow the audience to live in O'Neill's great poetry. Criticized throughout his career for his lack of sense of humor and tin ear, the soaring speeches and monologues from his great plays are beautiful in terms of rhythm, sound, and expressiveness, not only for what they say, but also for what they hide. Even as stern a critic regarding O'Neill as Brustein admits that O'Neill did finally achieve the poetic stature he sought in his plays and did not simply "stammer" at the end. No one needs to convince the audience of Burns's film that O'Neill's poetry exists. The film projects the "native eloquence" of O'Neill for all to witness and cherish.

While Pacino and Plummer create performances that are new and exciting and point to the future of O'Neill productions, it is fitting that the late Jason Robards, arguably the most famous interpreter of O'Neill, gets the last word. It is more than a little ironic that the film ends with the renaissance of O'Neill, the great performances in 1956 of The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's Journey into Night, which gave O'Neill his last Pulitzer Prize but more importantly brought him back to public eye and restored his reputation. O'Neill had always seen his audience as a reading audience, not a theatrical one. Yet, productions of his plays continue to make him relevant today. Robards, at the end, talks about the eternal theatrical triangle composed of the playwright, actor, and audience. He recalls how Ralph Richardson talked of breaking the bounds of time and space with each theatrical performance, hinting at the way time passes differently, onstage and in the audience, during a theatrical performance and how a play, despite being grounded in a single playing area, has the ability through the imagination of the performer, but also of the audience, to go and to be anywhere. "We have to be free to dream," Robards adds, simply.

For those who have dreamed of seeing O'Neill in a new light, a light that shines on the last century but illuminates the future as well, Ric Burns's film is a glorious achievement that will excite new audiences previously unfamiliar with O'Neill while providing new insights to those who have studied the playwright and his works for a lifetime. The film is a generous gift for which the O'Neill community of scholars, theater professionals, and enthusiasts is very deeply grateful.

WORKS CITED

Bogard, Travis. Contour in Time. 1972. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Eugene O'Neill: A Documentary Film, Dir. Ric Burns. Written by Arthur and Barbara Gelb and Ric Burns. American Experience, PBS, 2006.

O'Neill, Eugene. Complete Plays 1932-1943. Ed. Travis Bogard. Vol. 3. New York: Library of America, 1988.