In the following essay, Fiero discusses the differences between the printed and produced versions of O'Neill's play. Fiero is a professor of English at the University of Southwestern Louisiana and an actor.

By the time Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night hit the boards at Broadway's Helen Hayes Theatre, absurdist playwrights like Samuel Beckett and Eugene lonesco had already begun an assault on language as an inadequate tool for authentic communication. In his play, written fifteen years earlier, O'Neill seems to have come to a similar conclusion, though in a much more familiar guise: his relentless and trenchant realism, Edmund, the playwright's persona in the baldly autobiographical play, seems to sum up O'Neill's belief as he concludes his long monologue in Act Four: "I just stammered. That's the best I'll ever do. I mean, if I live. Well, it will be faithful realism, at least. Stammering...