When first produced by the Theatre Guild at the John Golden Theatre in New York City in 1928, Strange Interlude was an unexpected success. The play lasted nearly five hours (not including the one-hour interval for dinner) and held the audience's attention throughout. It went on to become the most successful American play produced up to that time, with 426 Broadway performances in its first production. According to literary critic Travis Bogard, writing in Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O'Neill, audiences at the time regarded it as a play "which dealt seriously with facets of human nature not yet fully explored" and which were just becoming more widely known in the work of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and James Joyce. However, not all reviewers shared the enthusiasm of the play-going public. Bogard points out that some regarded it as "naïve in its use of...