“Our lives,” says Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Leeds, “are merely strange dark interludes in the electrical display of God the Father.” For New York theatergoers, this summer has been a strange dark interlude in the electrical display of Broadway: in the supposed dog days, before yet another round of hyped projects, lamebrain revivals, and dinner-theater compilation shows lumbers into what passes for life, New York has enjoyed some rare outbursts of real drama that put the official “season” to shame. Perhaps it was inevitable: the legitimate stage has dwindled away in most corners of the Republic to “summer theater,” so why should the big town be the only part of the country without its Fourth-of-July-to-Labor-Day lollipops? The “season” is now so discredited and enfeebled and arouses such little anticipation that there’s both logic and cachet to disdaining it and scheduling your production during the summer snooze. The weird inverting effect of the interlude was encapsulated by events at the Circle in the Square: even as the theater declared bankruptcy, dumped artistic director Josephine Abbady, and canceled the entire 1996–97 season, its summer filler was playing to packed houses and extending its run. The reason for its off-season hit is a simple one: the star of Hughie, by Eugene O’Neill, is Al Pacino. But there’s more to it than bankability; the Circle has always picked good plays, but in recent seasons routinely diminished them by complacent stagings whose pace was dictated chiefly by the cumbersome scenery; Pacino’s production, though under