A Moon for the Misbegotten
A Moon for the Misbegotten is a play in four acts by Eugene O'Neill. The play is a sequel to O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, with the Jim Tyrone character as an older version of Jamie Tyrone. He began drafting the play late in 1941, set it aside after a few months and returned to it a year later, completing the text in 1943 – his final work, as his failing health made it physically impossible for him to write.[1] The play premiered on Broadway in 1957 and has had four Broadway revivals, plus a West End engagement.
Plot[edit]
Set in a dilapidated Connecticut house in early September 1923, the play focuses on three characters: Josie, a domineering Irish woman with a quick tongue and a ruined reputation, her conniving father, tenant farmer Phil Hogan, and James Tyrone, Jr., Hogan's landlord and drinking companion, a cynical alcoholic haunted by the death of his mother.
The play begins with Mike, the last of Hogan's three sons, leaving the farm. As a joke during one of their drunken bouts, Tyrone threatens to sell his land to his hated neighbor, T. Steadman Harder, and evict Hogan. Hogan creates a scheme in which Josie will get Tyrone drunk, seduce him, and blackmail him. Josie and Tyrone court in the moonlight.
The scheme falls through when Josie finds out that Tyrone isn't going to sell the land to Harder after all. Tyrone tells Josie the story of how, after his mother died, he traveled back East on the train, and hired a blonde prostitute for $50 a night to overcome his grief.
The four-act play ends with James Tyrone leaving for New York to handle his mother's estate, apparently to die soon of complications from alcoholism.
Autobiographical aspects[edit]
As in Journey, the Tyrone character is based on Eugene O'Neill's older brother, Jamie O'Neill.
Critical response[edit]
According to Michael Manheim, the 1973 revival, starring Jason Robards and Colleen Dewhurst, was "the most famous" of the productions, and "the performances of this production are usually seen as the defining interpretations of Tyrone and Josie."[13]
The CurtainUp reviewer of the 2000 revival compared the 1973 production: "Dewhurst and Robards rescued O'Neill's failed play from neglect by digging beneath the facades these desperate people presented to the world -- he as a cynical carouser, she as the town tramp....The revival at the Morosco...proved O'Neill scholar Travis Bogard right when he declared Moon 'doomed to failure without superb acting' since no subsequent production ever recreated the magic of those 314 performances.[14]
In his review of the 2007 production, Ben Brantley, writing in The New York Times mentioned the prior two revivals, noting "Both those versions emphasized the pathos of Moon, written in 1943 and first produced on Broadway in 1957. Inspired by the unhappy final chapters in the life of O’Neill’s ne’er-do-well older brother, James, the play is singular within its author’s body of work for its forgiving spirit."[10]