See Photos of the Original Production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night

The latest Broadway production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night is nominated for Best Revival of a Play at this year’s Tony Awards, which will take place on Sunday night. (The other nominees are Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, Blackbird and Noises Off.) The play, which is longer than your average show but covers just one day in 1912, has now been revived on Broadway five times.

Back in March of 1956, LIFE Magazine profiled the original production of the Eugene O’Neill masterwork, sending photographer Carl Mydans to Stockholm to capture the actors at work. The play would open on Broadway later that year.

O’Neill had completed the play in 1940, as the magazine explained, but barred it from being produced until after he died. Even after O’Neill’s passing in late 1953, it would take another few years for the first production to be mounted in Sweden. “[At that point], the reason for the delay became clear,” LIFE noted. “His last tragedy is pure autobiography, laying open the painful truth of the American dramatist’s early family life.”

Though the write-up wasn’t all praise for the work—Long Day’s Journey was and remains, well, very long with characters who “move as plotlessly as figures in a nightmare”—the magazine found that the play was a finding cap to the career of a theatrical genius. As to whether the revival is as worthy of equal accolades, the theater world will answer that question this weekend.