A Moon for the Misbegotten

OLD PLAYS

A Eugene O'Neill play is somewhat like a confession without hope of absolution. The sense of sin lies too deep to be expiated. Past guilts abort present action and remorse is denied relief. The characters reach out to one another for affection and frustratingly embrace only the perturbed, tormented shadows of themselves.

One of O'Neill's last plays, A Moon for the Misbegotten, is laid in just such a haunted house of self. It has been revived at Off-Broadway's Circle in the Square Theater in a production of attentive care. The actors' skill, however, cannot fully disguise the weaknesses of a play that contains more reverie than conflict, more dreams than drama. It is an attenuated lament for the loveless, a gentle moonlit ode to the undernourished heart. Each of the three leading characters is an emotional cripple. Phil Hogan is "misbegotten" because his spirit is as mean and flinty as the rocky Connecticut land he farms. His daughter Josie is "misbegotten" because she weighs 180 Ibs., stands 5 ft. 11 in., and is, in her own eyes, "a big, rough, ugly cow of a woman." A virgin who shams wantonness, Josie is wildly in love with Landlord Jim Tyrone Jr., a dead soul embalmed in alcohol. Tyrone is, of course, another portrayal of O'Neill's elder brother who also appears in Long Day's Journey Into Night.

Hogan tells Josie that their landlord is about to sell the farm out from under them and makes her agree to a shotgun plot: she will get Jim drunk, lure him to bed, and keep him there until her father appears with witnesses. The scheme backfires in a tender, boozy nightlong sharing of longings and confidences. Jim falls asleep, little-boy-fashion, with his head in Josie's lap, but not before revealing that there is room in his spent life for only one woman, his dead mother. Dawn finds him, the father and the daughter locked again in separate dooms.

As always, O'Neill's language halts short of eloquence; yet in some peculiar way his characters speak a poignant, subliminal dialogue that makes the audience hear what does not quite get said. A supple cast that obviously loves and understands the play gives it emotive depth. As Hogan, W. B. Brydon is a raffish, truculent blend of peasant guile and blather, while Mitchell Ryan's sodden, dandyish Jim Tyrone is a tarnished peacock straight from Old Broadway. Salome Jens, with hoydenish charm, discloses the vulnerable waif inside the intimidating woman. Director Theodore Mann has sensitively staged the play in fidelity to O'Neill's intent: Moon does not brighten the sky, but mirrors itself in melancholy fragments on a swelling sea of sorrow.

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