Lange poignantly captures the many nuances of Mary’s sad, troubled life—her descent into drug addiction; her disappointment in her marriage to James Tryone, falling in love with him when he was a matinee idol but seeing their marriage disintegrate into a vacuous life for her as he turned into a boring, miserly skinflint; her attempt to live with illusions rather than reality; the pain of refusing to face the illness of her son Edmund; the feeling that she is being constantly watched and her climactic recapturing in memory the days of her youth, beauty and aspirations, hauntingly expressed in the sensitive speech O’Neill has given Mary. Lange rips us apart emotionally in what is surely the finest work by an actress this season.

The production as a whole, under the direction of Jonathan Kent, with the action taking place in 1912 in the bleak Tyrone summer home designed by Tom Pye, is compelling in various ways. There are excellent performances by Michael Shannon as the bitter, jealous and disillusioned son, James Tyron, Jr., and John Gallagher, Jr. as the younger, ill Edmund, who longs to be a writer, as did O’Neill. Colby Minfie is refreshingly good as Catherine, the feisty Irish maid.

As for Gabriel Byrne as James Tyrone, husband and father, he is strong in a mostly one-note fashion. His stinginess has taken a toll on Edmund by his father not sending him to a doctor better than the local but cheaper one, and the decision to send Edmund to a state facility for treatment instead of a superior one that would cost more. Byrne expresses Tyrone’s exasperation with his sons, especially James, and there are powerful scenes with flashes of anger at them, yet also moments of attempted compassion, as is the case with his attempt to be compassionate with Mary, but finding it impossible to deal with her addiction. Byrne gets this portrait of Tyrone right.

What’s missing in Byrne’s performance is any indication that he could have once been the matinee idol that captivated Mary and the theater-going public. Laurence Olivier achieved that it a production I saw in London. You could envision him as an actor in the past. None of that is conveyed by Byrne. But Byrne is forceful as the man Tyrone has become.