But one of the marvels of ''Long Day's Journey'' -- and one reason it so often seems newly born with every revival -- is that it can accommodate shifts in its center of emotional gravity. It is Tyrone Sr. who has most often dominated accounts of the play, from the original, in 1956, with Fredric March in the role, to the Jack Lemmon version of 17 years ago.
Here, however, it is Mary who emerges as the show's defining spirit, a woman who is at once the source, the victim and the clarifying and distorting mirror of the violent contradictions that animate the Tyrones. She also sets the compulsive rhythms -- the seesawing between affection and retribution, between the urges to heal and to hurt -- that is the family dynamic.
At least for the first two-thirds of the production, Mary's frightening supremacy makes inspired good sense, both psychologically and theatrically. Only in the final act, in which the men remember the Mama who has retreated into a distant, medicated haze offstage, do you realize completely the extent to which the rest of the cast has yet to approach Ms. Redgrave's level of insight and intensity.
All three men in the ensemble, which is rounded out by Fiana Toibin as Cathleen the maid, give the impression that they are still in the process of fully discovering their characters, especially Mr. Hoffman, a brilliant actor who is oddly tentative here. I suspect that before the play's run ends on Aug. 31, however, they will all have come substantially into their own.
Were the other cast members to become as searingly vivid as the spectral, statuesque Mary of Ms. Redgrave, who has seldom looked more beautiful or more ravaged, I'm not sure that audiences could bear it. This is Ms. Redgrave's best work in years and among her best ever.
The director Peter Hall, after seeing Ms. Redgrave in Ibsen's ''Lady From the Sea'' in the 1970's, wrote, ''You could see right through the skin to the emotions, the thoughts, the hopes, the fears underneath.'' This transparency is especially remarkable in ''Journey'' because Mary never seems to experience only one feeling at a time.
From the moment Mary and Tyrone first appear, emerging cozily from breakfast into the living room of the family's summer home in Connecticut (a monumental wooden tomb as designed by Santo Loquasto), you are conscious of the state of heightened emotional flux in which Ms. Redgrave's performance is cast. Her girlish smile slides askew for one startling second, as if she had suddenly been ambushed by unspeakable thoughts.
Once the boys join their parents, Mary's manner of dealing with her men becomes increasingly divided, as do her allegiances. The spotlight of response she turns on the others keeps changing its colors, from fretful solicitude to harsh reproach, from the sly self-concealing lies of a confirmed drug addict to raw self-revelation. What's most remarkable is the fluidity with which these shifts occur and how surprising they remain throughout the evening.
Watch carefully, for example, when Tyrone comes in late for lunch, and Mary rushes toward her husband with what you take at first for flirtatious chiding. Then without warning, she has become a fierce harpy, screaming out the grievances of a lifetime, which she will enumerate throughout the play as if they were rosary beads.
Or observe later, as Mary sits in the twilight with Cathleen (nicely played by Ms. Toibin), as the older woman recounts memories in which she genuinely becomes the girl she was when her husband, then a golden matinee idol, courted her. Then her voice sinks, her eyes go cold, and she dismisses Cathleen with the peremptoriness of someone for whom any kind of companionship is a burden.
These radical swings in sensibility, for which ambivalence is too weak a word, are only an extreme version of the behavior of all the Tyrones. Mary's behavior is an X-ray, of sorts, of the patterns within O'Neill's family portrait.
The separate encounters among the men, which might pass for ordinary domestic chafing in another context, are illuminated by the subtext Mary has so fiercely dragged to the surface. Everyone is caught in the same cyclical dance of love and war, propitiating and solacing one instant and attacking with a vengeance the next.
Mr. Falls has given these conflicting elements strongly physical life, as his performers move from hungry embraces to abrupt, strong-armed stiffness, as they push one another away. Mr. Dennehy, who collaborated to dazzling effect with Mr. Falls on ''Death of a Salesman,'' is especially good at evoking the memory of the erotic ties that bind Tyrone to Mary.
You can tell that he still sees his bride within her. And he has his character's Irish gallantry and defensive loquacity down cold. What he hasn't captured is the grand old ham in Tyrone, the man who ruled the stage for decades as a swashbuckler. Even reciting Shakespeare, he retains his brogue.
On the heels of impressive appearances in ''The Invention of Love'' and ''Fifth of July,'' Mr. Leonard delivers another affecting, cleanly drawn character study. He doesn't overdo Edmund's lyrical side, and with Ms. Redgrave, he is heartbreaking, conveying the abject woundedness of a son who wants so badly to reclaim the mother who keeps receding from him.
Mr. Hoffman has yet to settle comfortably into his role of the older brother, though he has promisingly astute moments, especially when Jamie crumples from bravado into shame. There's often a blankness, though, that suggests that he is treading water in the early scenes. And he plays the climactic, whiskey-fueled confrontation with Edmund with a flamboyant drunkenness that panders to the audience while blunting the pain of the scene.
Even given these lapses, however, this remains the most lucid and unsettling account of ''Journey'' that I have ever seen. Ultimately Ms. Redgrave's Mary does not run away with the show, which would terminally upset its balance. Instead, she radiates a searching, flickering light that reveals not only the battling selves beneath her skin but those of the others as well.
''The past is the present, isn't it?'' Mary asks famously. ''It's the future, too. We all try to lie out of that, but life won't let us.'' Ms. Redgrave's Mary reminds you that O'Neill's ''Journey'' is a ghost story, in which the phantoms are not things of ectoplasm but blood relations. This Mary is a living specter who haunts her own life as she does the lives of her husband and sons. No one who sees Ms. Redgrave's performance will ever again be able to say there are no such things as ghosts.
LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT
By Eugene O'Neill; directed by Robert Falls; sets and costumes by Santo Loquasto; lighting by Brian MacDevitt; sound by Richard Woodbury; stage management, Jane Grey; company manager, Bruce Klinger; technical supervisor, Neil Mazzella; general management, Albert Poland; associate producers, entitled entertainment, Ergo Entertainment, Anna Ryan Hansen and Toby Simkin. Presented by David Richenthal, Max Cooper, Eric Falkenstein, Anthony and Charlene Marshall and Darren Bagert, in association with Kara Medoff, Lisa Vioni and Gene Korf. At the Plymouth Theater, 236 West 45th Street, Manhattan.
WITH: Brian Dennehy (James Tyrone), Vanessa Redgrave (Mary Cavan Tyrone), Philip Seymour Hoffman (James Tyrone Jr.), Robert Sean Leonard (Edmund Tyrone) and Fiana Toibin (Cathleen).
