“Long Day’s Journey into Night,” Eugene O’Neill’s gut-wrenching family drama, is playing in a superlative production at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Thomas Theatre.When O’Neill fashioned this play based on his miserable youth, he stipulated it could not be published until 25 years after his death, and never be performed. But after he died in 1953 his widow soon had it produced on Broadway, and it earned Pulitzer and Tony Awards.Clearly it would have been too painful for him to watch, but thankfully audiences haven’t been deprived of this brilliantly told tale of family members who love each other but can’t help inflicting vicious wounds, sometimes inadvertently, sometimes deliberately.We are fortunate to see it in such a fine rendition, but if you quake at spending nearly four hours with the archetypal dysfunctional family, or if you’re going to Ashland mainly to see “Guys and Dolls,” this may not be the play for you.However, if you can take “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” you
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