Theater Review—

Long Wharf’s Production Of O’Neill Leaves Audiences Thinking

By Julie Stern

NEW HAVEN — A Moon for the Misbegotten was Eugene O’Neill’s last play, completed in 1943. Together with Long Day’s Journey Into Night, written two years earlier, it was an autobiographical examination of the tragic secrets that haunted the O’Neill family, particularly Eugene’s older brother, Jamie, who had died of acute alcoholism in 1923.

The plays deal with the tortured dynamics of the James Tyrone family – an Irish American stage actor, his wife and two sons. Long Day’s Journey moves inexorably toward the revelation of why Jim Tyrone, the charming, gifted older son, is a self destructive failure, and why the mother he adores withholds the love he so desperately craves.

Moon – which is currently in production by Long Wharf Theatre – takes place 11 years later, after both the elder Tyrones have died, and Jim’s alcoholism has reached the point where he can barely function. The story revolves around a scheme by Phil Hogan, his tenant farmer and erstwhile drinking companion, to gain financial security by engineering a marriage between Hogan’s daughter Josie, and their unstable landlord.

Aware that Josie and Jim have always liked each other, Hogan plots to have the two spend a night alone at the farm. Josie is to get Jim drunk enough to overcome both their inhibitions and seduce him, at which point her father will appear “with witnesses” and demand that Jim do the honorable thing and marry her.        

Instead, while Phil gets too drunk to remember his own plan, Jim and Josie pass the long night in soul baring revelation on his part, and faltering tenderness on hers. Beneath their public personae, or (as O’Neill’s favorite psychologist, Karl Jung called them, “masks”), Jim and Josie are two fragile, deeply wounded souls. Hiding behind the posture of a jocular Broadway bon vivant, Jim is tormented by guilt and shame over the ways in which he feels he betrayed his mother; staying perpetually drunk is the only way he can escape the pain of recurrent flashbacks.

Josie’s pose of being a tough, worldly-wise cynic who sleeps with whoever she chooses, is a cover for the fact that she is a shy and lonely virgin, who imagines herself so unattractive that she can’t imagine any man would ever love her.

Under the spell of the spectacular moonlight, these two make a tentative but real connection. Understanding what Jim is suffering, Josie, by playing the role of a forgiving mother, is able to give him a single night’s solace, and in return, is able to experience the true generosity of selfless love.

There is no happy ending beyond Jim’s momentary sense of peace and Josie’s recognition of her true self. To all intents and purposes he is already dead, a victim of the monstrous ravages of alcoholism. Josie will settle for remaining with her father on their hardscrabble bit of farm, and as the morning light dawns over the stage, the magical connection fades away.

Long Wharf Theatre, which has a long tradition of honoring the classics, has staged a beautiful and powerful production in this case, beginning with Ming Cho Lee’s beautifully crafted and realistically detailed set of the ramshackle farmhouse with a real- and much used- water pump in its front yard.

Alyssa Bresnahan gives a terrific performance as Josie Hogan, although it is hard to imagine why she would ever see herself as unattractive. John Procaccino in the part of the polished, well-educated Jim, is a bit reminiscent of Alan Alda (for whom he once understudied), and Bill Raymond plays a kind of stereotypical blathering Irishman in the role of Josie’s father.

Like a sculptor working in stone, O’Neill creates rough-hewn characters of monumental size, best viewed from the distant perspective of reconsideration. In other words, after you have experience the vicarious emotional impact of what happens on stage, you go home thinking about it for a long time. And as Aristotle said, that is the purpose of tragedy. 

(Performances – and special related programs – continue until March 27. Contact Long Wharf Theatre at 203-787-4282 for details.)