STAGE REVIEW : ‘Night’ a Long Journey at Gem Theatre

GARDEN GROVE â€”  Come clean, we’re told. The major candidates for President toss that phrase at their opponents. Thousands of therapists and confessors counsel coming clean, on the assumption that the truth will set us free.

Those troubled Tyrones, in Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,� know better. During the course of a day at the summer house in 1912, the members of this family repeatedly throw each other into the wash, psychologically speaking. But some stains are too deep.

O’Neill’s autobiographical expurgation has begun anew, in a GroveShakespeare production at the Gem Theatre that’s blessed with a quartet of gifted actors well-cast as the Tyrones, though one of them is not yet up to snuff.

If Jules Aaron’s staging ultimately is more admirable than moving, the fault may lie as much with the play itself as with this production. O’Neill dissipated some of the strength of his towering characterizations with overkill.

Aaron has judiciously trimmed the play down to just short of three hours, with one intermission--something that one wonders if O’Neill himself might have done, had he been alive when the play was first produced. Still, the first word of the title should be taken seriously; at Sunday’s performance, you could hear the audience shifting in its seats out of restlessness deep into the play.

Don’t blame Mitchell Ryan, however. He’s magnificent as the senior James Tyrone. Described in O’Neill’s stage directions as 65 but looking 10 years younger, Tyrone is a self-made matinee idol, an inveterate drinker, an equally unyielding tightwad. Ryan’s chiseled jaw and robust stance look exactly right. His face turns bright red when he loses his temper, but just as impressive are the scenes where he hardly moves a muscle.

Note, for example, the pleasure he takes when he’s listening to younger son Edmund’s dreams in a rare quiet moment in the second half. In many ways, Edmund is like an alien creature to Tyrone, but Ryan sees to it that the paternal bond glows despite their differences. It’s a beautiful moment.

The older son Jamie is much more like his father, and Alan Feinstein’s Jamie is a superbly blemished copy of Ryan’s James--the same good looks and jaunty step marred by a touch of dissolute discontent and a short-wired temper. Jamie, however, has extra helpings of self-loathing stemming from his knowledge of that resemblance, and Feinstein’s drunken sorrow in his final scenes is a charged reminder of that.

Morgan Rusler is shorter than many an Edmund, but he uses that not to emphasize the character’s physical frailty or his whining but rather to whip up an extra degree of compensatory flintiness in his encounters with his big brother and his irascible father. He goes the distance.

The production’s biggest question mark is Salome Jens as Mary, the isolated and drug-addicted figure at the center of the family’s current crisis. Mary gradually slips further away from her brood, but only after expressing her own brand of bile in several little out-of-control speeches.

Jens has those most bitter moments thoroughly in hand. But many of her shifts between reality and illusion, between despair and denial, are not as sharply delineated here as they are in the script. Her family suddenly stares at her when they realize she has slipped another notch, but we have to take their word for it, most of the time, for we don’t see it in Jens.

At Sunday’s performance Jens occasionally stumbled over lines. This is something Mary might do, so it wasn’t terribly jarring, but it happened often enough that it interfered slightly with our ability to see Mary instead of Jens.

As usual, the brief appearances of the servant Cathleen were especially welcome, not just for her comic relief but also because hers is the only role written with any sense of economy. Alice Cunningham handles it nicely.

John Iacovelli’s set hovers comfortably between Mary’s comments about Tyrone’s thrift and the fact that the family does, after all, maintain three servants. And Ted C. Giammona’s costumes are telling down to the hole in the armpit of Tyrone’s first suit and the stifling quality of Mary’s gowns.

* “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,� Gem Theatre, 12852 Main St., Garden Grove. Wednesdays-Sundays, 8 p.m., Sunday matinees, 3 p.m. Ends Oct. 31. $18-$22. (714) 636-7213. Running time: 2 hours, 50 minutes.

Mitchell Ryan: James Tyrone

Salome Jens: Mary Cavan Tyrone

Alan Feinstein: James Tyrone Jr.

Morgan Rusler: Edmund Tyrone

Alice Cunningham: Cathleen

A GroveShakespeare production. Directed by Jules Aaron. Sets John Iacovelli. Lights Martin Aronstein. Costumes Ted C. Giammona. Music and sound Chuck Estes. Technical director Richard Hess. Stage manager Nevin Hedley.