20 January 2006: O’Neill, A Moon for the Misbegotten
20 January 2006: O’Neill, A Moon for the Misbegotten
Hartford Stage. The New Haven Long Wharf Theatre production, directed by Gordon Edelstein. Scenic design: Ming Cho Lee. Josie: Alysia Bresnahan. James Tyrone Jr.: James Colby. Phil Hagan, her father: Bill Raymond. Stage run 5 January – 5 February 2006.
I gave up my Hartford Stage subscription at the end of last season: too many musicals and one-person shows. Times are tough for regional theaters, but that doesn’t mean I have to go to see things I don’t want to see, out of loyalty. (The same thing has happened in the case of the Huntington Theatre in Boston.) But I was glad to go back to see this fine production of O’Neill’s splendid last play.
Bresnahan and Colby have been a familiar duo; Edelstein reportedly calls them “the Lunts.” I saw them in Streetcar and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, both at Hartford Stage, as I recall. Bresnahan is perfectly cast as the sinful woman with heart (or a heart of gold), a woman whose sexuality is felt so instinctively real and, finally, not to be apologized for; Colby, for his part, is at home in the sensual, self-indulgent man of the world roles. Taken over by O’Neill, we see some reincarnations of earlier characters — Anna Christie, Adam Brandt, others — rough, unrescuable characters who know themselves as that already or come to confront the fact in the course of the play.
O’Neill’s restless, unhappy lifetime of dramaturgical experimentation, viewed in retrospect through the late double prisms of Long Day’s Journey and Moon, appear, like an overlong series of growing pains, from which he at last emerged whole and sound, a functional adult dramatist. The dialogue is really wonderful, for long stretches, here; we can stop complaining about the “tin ear” all too evident in Emperor Jones, Mourning Becomes Electra, and Desire Under the Elms. Of course, Irish accents, in Josie and Phil, are much in evidence; but it is a lingo O’Neill knew much better than the African-American (as we now choose to call it), and the clichéed “By Jingo” faux-Swedish of the earlier one-act plays. This is mature, confident, and utterly authentic work. He knew it, in his race against time to finish before crippling disease finally did him in; much later, so do we.
All the actors, including those who only appear briefly in the first act, are well up to the challenge. The brother, Mike Hogan, departing forever from an oppressive father, is easy enough; more difficult is the role of the wealthy owner of the ice pond invaded by Hogan’s pigs, T. Stedman Harder, played by Wynn Harmon. Of course, the real function of the scene is to bond Josie and Phil in a closer link, and to make them and James into a trio separated out from the rest of humanity as special and worth our sustained attention. In fact, this is what O’Neill succeeds in doing for his central characters in every one of his successful plays — witness the choric presence of the townspeople, on the periphery of the main characters, in Mo