Composed in 1941, Long Day's Journey into Night is O’Neill's most memorable drama and in the opinion of many the best American drama ever written. When it opened at Dramaten in 1988 to celebrate the centennial of the author's birth, it was the first and only time that B staged an O’Neill play – surprisingly, perhaps, in view of his relation to the American playwright via their common spiritual father Strindberg. About a month before the opening he told a journalist that Long Day's Journey “has a dark downward attraction. If you finally come down to the level where the demons live who have triggered the drama, you cannot remain free of them.” If this seems to indicate an involvement with the theme of the play, the closing remark in the prompt script about the rehearsals suggests rather the opposite: “It was a damned finicky job. Never ended.” Many years later B denied any affinity with O’Neill and minimised his own part in the production:

I have no relation to O’Neill. I took on Long Day's Journey as a kind of loyalty toward the theatre that wished to present it in connection with its jubilee and above all as a loyalty to the actors who were to have important roles. […] When we got going it was as if the rehearsals managed themselves. I felt more like a rehearsal guard. (Sjögren. 2002: 428)

B's very modest enthusiasm presumably concerned not so much the play itself. Rather, it was caused on the one hand by the fact that, unlike what he was used to, the decision to stage the play was not his own but the theatre’s, on the other by his feeling rather superfluous as a director. The last applied especially to the actor playing the part of Jamie who refused to follow B's suggestions (Steene, 2005: 701). Ironically this actor was especially praised by the critics.

Dramaten has a very special relationship to O’Neill. It was there that many of his plays were performed in the period when his own country seemed to turn its back on him.