. . . the playhouse . . . was little more than a shell. . . . Through the planks of its floor at high tide the bay could be seen and heard and smelled. Under Cook’s direction an ingenious stage was built. Only ten by twelve feet, it was sectional and mobile and could be slid backward onto the end of the wharf through the two wide doors at the rear of the theater, to provide an effect of distance. Those doors, through which fishermen had once hurled their catch, could be flung apart to expose the most realistic sea backdrop any theater ever had. . . .
—description of the Provincetown Players’ Wharf Theater from Arthur and Barbara Gelb’s biography of Eugene O’Neill

Certainly, one of the infallible signs that Coarse Drama is going on is the fact that the traditional roles of actor and audience are reversed. The actor is being himself while the audience are playing a part. . . .
—from Michael Green’s The Art of Coarse Acting

It says in my notes for the evening of April 29, “‘It’s a little late in the day for regrets’”—which isn’t exactly the line that James Tyrone is meant to deliver in Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Whether those are the words Jack Lemmon actually uttered on the stage of the Broadhurst Theatre that night or simply the ones I heard, I can’t say for sure. They’re what I wrote down; and next