A Moon For The Misbegotten

Play (1943)
by Eugene O’Neill

With Audra McDonald (Josie Hogan), Will Swenson (James Tyrone, Jr.), Glynn Turman (Phil Hogan), Howard W. Overshown (Mike Hogan), Aaron Costa Ganis (T. Stedman Harder)

In the original, Josie is an Irish-American force of nature, in love with the ill-fated, alcoholic, half-baked actor Jim, who shows up in this sort-of sequel to O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1942). Here Jim is at the end of his line, worn out by drink and aggrieved by the death of his mother. Having lived a life of indulgence and now dissolute, he finds comfort in the arms of Josie, who has loved him quietly but with a veneer of bravado and, what turns out to be falsely represented, promiscuity. This pair of tragic and self-destructive figures meet briefly in the night for a moment of near passion, its intensity deriving from their shared vulnerabilities and an incapacity to cross the divide that separates them.

There is a bit more plot to the setup: Josie’s father, Phil Hogan (Glynn Turman), a tenant farmer on Tyrone’s land, is ready to utilize Josie’s dallying with Tyrone to force his hand not to sell the farm out from under him to a wealthy neighbor, T. Stedman Harder (Aaron Costa Ganis). Engaged in the deceit, Josie soon discovers that Jim was never going to sell the farm, but the momentum of their moment of intimacy, already charged, carries them forth.

The transformation of Josie and her father and brother into African-American tenant farmers in Connecticut is an interesting but loaded choice. The original formulation of the play relies heavily on a feeling for the Irish-American immigrant sensibility and the associated anguish shared by the main characters. The jump to an interracial motif is a curious one and stretches the original ideas in some thought-provoking ways, though there are times when the stretch is difficult to accommodate. That Josie, as conceived by O’Neill, is a big-boned and not particularly attractive Irish-American woman who cultivates the illusion of sexual promiscuity to hide her real feelings for Jim translates with some difficulty, especially as set in 1923, to an interracial motif.

Audra McDonald provides a truly forceful presence on the stage and makes significant dramatic inroads into this challenging character. The character O’Neill describes is large and unattractive, and though McDonald has a substantial presence, it is quite difficult to think of her as at all plain, nay unattractive, even with valiant efforts from the makeup department. Despite that, she offer a substantial sense of pathos to the role, yielding a vivid sense of the tragic unfulfillment it conveys.

McDonald’s real-life husband, Will Swenson, known for his work in a variety of musicals on Broadway and in national touring companies, plays Tyrone. It is, indeed, endearing to see him and McDonald onstage together wrestling with this challenging dramatic material; one can only admire a married couple that takes on this grim and evocative challenge. That being said, the existential demands of the part may be somewhat more significant than for which he has been trained. Indeed, the run of this play is fairly short; for an actor not well-versed in roles of this type to adequately address the significant psychological and emotional demands of this extremely demanding part, a longer preparation would be welcome.

To be sure, the character of Jim Tyrone is a particularly difficult one. On the surface, dissolute and frivolous, he is, beneath, riddled with anguish and pain, providing him the magnetism that draws Josie towards him. Requiring a superficial playfulness, the role demands an undercurrent fraught by desperation. In the great 2003 revival on Broadway of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Philip Seymour Hoffman, an actor supremely suited to conveying this combination of traits, played James Tyrone, Jr. memorably and eloquently.

The current production bears these two interesting experiments – the switch from Irish-American to African-American tenant farmers, and the use of the married McDonald and Swenson in the leading roles – offering a bit of meta-drama, making one wonder how they will play out during the run.

This O’Neill epic, like Long Day’s Journey and The Iceman Cometh (1939), is full of words; one wonders, not infrequently, whether they are all necessary. O’Neill’s gift for gab attenuates the continual surprise that, from this preponderance of words, profound dramatic tragedy emerges. Theatrical alchemy occurs in these great O’Neill plays and it is captivating to watch a forceful stage presence like McDonald engage with it, whatever the attendant experiments around her might be.

– BADMan