Theater Review—

An Impressive ‘Moon’ Has Temporary Residence At Ridgefield Theater Barn

By Julie Stern

RIDGEFIELD — For its current production of the last of Eugene O’Neill’s plays, A Moon For The Misbegotten, Ridgefield Theater Barn, long one of the best local theater companies, has brought in an infusion of new blood, with the entire cast, as well as the director, making their debut at the RTB. While I would have said that this was in no way necessary, the resulting cross pollination is very impressive indeed.

Director Maryann Arcoleo-Koltun has gotten excellent performances from her cast, including Philip Hahn and Roger Dykeman, and especially R.J. and Tina D’Amato, as the father and daughter Phil and Josie Hogan. In addition, Ms Arcoleo-Koltun has shaded the interpretation of the work so as to make the character of Hogan more complex and less of a caricature than I remember from other productions.

Together with Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Moon expresses O’Neill’s preoccupation with the tragic secrets that haunted his family, particularly his older brother, Jamie, who died of acute alcoholism. Both plays deal with the tortured dynamics of the James Tyrone family — an Irish American stage actor, his wife and two sons.

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 is set 11 years later, when both parents 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.

Instead, while Phil gets too drunk to carry out his share of the plan, Jim and Josie pass the long night together in soul baring revelation on his part, and faltering tenderness on hers. What becomes apparent is that these are two fragile, deeply wounded souls. Hiding behind the posture of a jocular Broadway bon vivant, Jim is tormented by guilt and shame over ways in which he feels he betrayed his mother. Staying perpetually drunk is the only way he can escape what he calls the heebies — that is, the pain of recurrent flashbacks.

Josie’s pose of being a tough, worldly wise cynic, who sleeps with any and every man she chooses, is a cover for the reality 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, the troubled pair make a tentative, but real, connection. Empathizing with Jim’s 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.

What made this production unique for me was R.J. Donato’s interpretation of Phil Hogan. Usually the old man is portrayed as a stereotypical blathering Irishman, whose meanness and drunken abusiveness drove his three sons away, leaving only Josie to help run the farm and bear the brunt of his cantankerousness. And while with his filthy undershirt and unkempt hair he looks like a cross between Pappy Yokum and Jeeter Lester (from God’s Little Acre), the force of Donato’s presence manages to invest the character with enough humanity that we can understand why Josie remains loyal to him when her brothers left.

The chemistry between this real life husband and wife is very strong, so that in this Ridgefield version it is almost as much a story of father and daughter as it is of the misbegotten lovers.

The winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature as well as three Pulitzers, Eugene O’Neill is arguably America’s greatest playwright, exploring the impact of human personalities in relationships, the desire for love and connectedness, and the forces that keep people separate.

The play is a little long, and to some it may seem dated, with its emphasis on the significance of virginity as opposed to loose women, but it affords a chance to experience serious classic American theater, lovingly produced, and including a realistic set by Myles Gansfield that is as good as anything you will see on a major stage.

(Performances continue Friday and Saturday evenings through April 10, at 37 Halpin Lane. A Sunday matinee is scheduled for March 28, and there are no performances Easter weekend.

For tickets and additional information call 203-431-9850 or visit RidgefieldTheaterBarn.org.)