STAGE

Swedish director Ingmar Bergman got rave reviews in Stockholm on Monday for his new production of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” on the same stage where the Eugene O’Neill masterpiece premiered in 1956. O’Neill, who died in 1953, bequeathed the world rights of his staged autobiographical reconciliation with a traumatic childhood to Stockholm’s Royal Dramatic Theatre in gratitude for the Nobel Prize in literature, which he received in 1936. Bergman, who retired from film making in 1984, trimmed the play to three hours from its original four-and-a-half and opted for sparse stage decorations. Bergman said O’Neill wrote the play “like a surgeon who enters with a scalpel and slices with deep revealing incisions.”