A Moon For The Misbegotten
Eugene O’Neill’s A MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN,
written toward the end of the playwright’s life, is a mighty
big work, standing next to MOBY DICK as a fable of American life and
tradition. So, reinventing it for theater audiences today is a daunting
task, one that’s overshadowed in my youthful memory by Jose Quintero’s
1973 production that starred Colleen Dewhurst and Jason Robards. Trying
to rediscover that depth of feeling, the urgency and mythic quality
of their partnership, is like the quest for the great white whale.
Like MOBY DICK, MOON, is a symbolic work, one
that celebrates among other things, the vastness of nature. There
is, after all, the titular reference. But most importantly, there’s
Josie, "an overgrown cow", a "big ugly cow". whose
affections allow James Tyrone to get in touch with his own oedipal
feelings.
Josie is a character of enormous contradictions,
commanding and tough on the outside, sensuous, sensitive and sore
on the inside. She’s the protector who yearns to be protected.
As portrayed by Cherry Jones, she is a youthful, albeit tough-minded
cowgirl, one who seems self-sustaining. So what happens between her
and James Tyrone is a moment she will live beyond. Their relationship
isn’t really tragic.
Daniel Sullivan’s direction focuses on the
play’s realism. Mike Hogan, Josie’s father, as played by
Paul Hewitt, is a cantankerous, comic old Irishman, who loves and
understands his daughter’s rough exterior. And Gabriel Byrne
as James Tyrone is a man obsessed by his mother, not just a crucified
actor in search of the Virgin Mary.
Unfortunately, O’Neill offers too little
explanation for James’s conflict with his mother, and Sullivan
looks too closely at the tangible, leaving the vastness of MOON in
the arms of two lonely, undiscovered people. What’s missing is
the mythic tension between extinction on one hand: the end of the
Tyrone family name and the loss of the Hogan farm, and eternity, symbolized
by the moon itself.
That’s This Week on Broadway. I’m Isa
Goldberg.
