Eugene O’Neill’s boozy tragedy isn’t for the faint hearted
In A Moon for the Misbegotten, Eugene O’Neill takes the character of Jamie from his Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winning play A Long Day’s Journey into Night and deposits him into the sort of domestic situation one would be well advised to steer clear of.
The setting is a crappy farm in Connecticut in the fall of 1923. More rocks than fertile farmland, the tenant farm owned by Jamie is inhabited by the shrinking Hogan Family. At the top of the show, we get an idea of the situation when one of the Hogan sons, Mike (Christopher Robin Donaldson) is being coached by his sister Josie to get the hell out of there and never come back.
Just before the old man Phil Hogan (a magnificently crusty Chris Kendall) returns, Mike beats his retreat — the third and last of the sons to depart. This leaves Josie alone with Phil, and we get an inkling of their relationship as they trade barbs with one another along with unflattering names like “cow” and “dirty old goat.”
Chris Kendall as Phil Hogan in the Cherry Creek Theatre production of ‘A Moon for the Misbegotten’ | Photo: Brian Miller
Thing is, in their own odd way, Josie and Phil get along, and she seems more or less resigned to eking out a hardscrabble life with her father while she remains single and, as we’re led to believe, carouses around as the town slut. Phil does his part holding up the family reputation by drinking his face off nightly at the tavern up the road, and one of his drinking buddies is Jamie. One night the latter makes a joke about selling the farm. Phil drunkenly believes there may be some truth to it and starts scheming with Josie to put the kibosh on any such action.
This is, in many ways, Josie’s story, and director Tara Falk chose wisely with Emily Paton Davies in the role. Moving with the script, she does excellent work breathing additional dimensions into a character that initially looks like a cliché of the tough-as-nails woman with no need of a man. Act Two action consists almost entirely of her ham-fisted seduction of Jamie, and as the evening in the moonlight unfolds, she gives up more and more of herself to save the farm, as it were, only later finding out the whole thing was unnecessary from the start.
As Jamie, Lindsey plays less the all-powerful landlord and rather a husk of a man hollowed out by booze. Tormented by his mother’s death and a mountain of remorse for sleeping with a prostitute, he repels Josie’s advances not because he’s uninterested but because he feels himself unworthy. It’s difficult to discern how serious the two are when they profess love for each other, but the uncertainty is the point.
O’Neill constructed Act Two as an endless night, where everytime we think Jamie is going to finally shove off, he returns to resume exhausting, circular and drunken conversational loops. Artistic Producer Suzie Snodgrass told me before the show that this production is a trimming that shaves an hour off the original script — making this one two-and-half hours with intermission. Even this shortened version is a bit of a slog to get through Act Two, and I found myself wishing for the return of the old man to break up the action.
Phil does finally return, late at night, drunk as a skunk and stunned to learn from Josie that the whole thing was a put-on in the first place and that Jamie has left — not expected to return.
And so there they are at the close of the show, alone together and seemingly committed to enduring it all until the end. The relationship between father and daughter is full of interesting dynamics, and although Phil won’t be getting a “World’s Greatest Dad” shirt anytime soon, he’s not violent toward Josie and appreciates the fact that, were she to leave, his miserable life would be untenable.
A Moon for the Misbegotten, his last play before illness prevented him from being able to write further, was initially a flop for O’Neill but gained popularity after his death. While it certainly has some juicy roles for actors, it didn’t resonate with me the way other modern American tragedies do. Something like Arthur Miller’s All My Sons is just as dark, but it’s powerful enough to be eminently watchable. I haven’t seen any other of O’Neill’s plays, but I couldn’t help but think that this one hasn’t aged well.
But while it may be a turnoff for some, it remains an interesting study in both futility and forgiveness, where unsavory characters are shown in a sympathetic light and their plight is familiar enough to anyone who’s abandoned dreams. And, as always, Cherry Creek has done an excellent job with it, breathing life into an American classic in a tight, well-wrought production that delivers as best it can with some tough material.
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