A Moon for the Misbegotten

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By Eugene O’Neill
February 25 through March 27
Previews February 23 and 24
Goldman Theater

An O’Neill classic! A drunken playboy, tries to blot out a haunting horrible memory while a heroic, plain-featured girl tries to win his love.  

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REVIEWS

Characters Won't Let Go of You

The Orlando Sentinel
from the review by Elizabeth Maupin
Posted 3/04/05

Nobody minces words in A Moon for the Misbegotten, Eugene O'Neill's classic comic drama about love, heartbreak, guilt and redemption.  Josie Hogan, the play's exuberant heroine, calls herself "a great ugly lump of a woman," and her father, Phil, calls her "an ugly old cow." In return, Josie labels Phil "a drunken old loon," and she describes the man she loves, the tormented Jim Tyrone, as looking "like a dead man following his own coffin."

But all of O'Neill's words are just masks to hide behind in A Moon for the Misbegotten. Director David Lee's glorious production for the Orlando-UCF Shakespeare Festival shows that what matters most in this passionate drama is what's inside the human heart -- and also that O'Neill and the Shakespeare Festival are an extraordinarily good fit.

Josie is one of theater's great creations -- a foul-mouthed, shameless giant of a woman who has built up that brazen exterior to conceal the enormous compassion she keeps inside. She's also a fitting foil to James Tyrone Jr., the lost soul who is one of the foundations of the playwright's masterpiece, Long Day's Journey Into Night, and who stands, in these autobiographical dramas, for O'Neill's weak older brother, Jamie.

In Moon, Jim Tyrone is haunted by his past: There's no present and no future, he says, just the past happening over and over again. And Josie Hogan hopes to free him from it -- to take him in her arms, to soothe him and somehow to lift the stake of guilt and sorrow from his heart.

All of that comes sublimely forth in the Shakespeare Festival's production, where Tom Mangieri's beautifully detailed set -- the crude hut and outbuildings of Phil Hogan's hardscrabble Connecticut farm -- looks warm and magical under Eric T. Haugen's gentle lighting. There Josie keeps house for the drunken, boisterous Phil; there she bids goodbye to the last of her brothers (Seth Maisel) to have fled Phil's clutches, and she and her rambunctious father make mincemeat of an insufferable snob of a neighbor (Timothy Shane), who has come to complain that Hogan's pigs are sullying his ice pond.

The ice pond story, which also turns up in Long Day's Journey, is a stitch, and it's a pleasure to find out, in Moon's captivating first act, just how funny O'Neill can be. But it's when the moon rises over the rocky Connecticut coast -- when Josie waits for Jim to come calling -- that this drama begins to work its spell.

A Moon for the Misbegotten's other characters are not mere window dressing: Phil Hogan is a comic masterpiece in his own right, and Robertson Carricart makes him a bantam rooster of a man, as full of blarney as the farmer's day is long. Shane and Maisel also make fine work of their brief appearances.

But it's the relationship between Josie and Jim that makes this play -- and the full-blooded characters created here that draw you in. Chicago actress Susan Felder gives Josie both a chip on her shoulder and a twinkle in her eye: She's womanly and motherly, but she's also hurting and bitter and as scrappy as a terrier inside a pen.

And Eric Hissom brings both a devilish streak and a vein of pure goodness to Jim, a man who can believe Josie to be a virgin at the same time he sees himself for exactly what he is. Hissom's Jim is funny enough to be a fitting companion for Phil at the local bars. But he's also just going through the motions: When you look right at him, his eyes are dead.

Still, there's something more to these characters: Lee and his actors have filled them with the grace of forgiveness, and that's what gives Hissom's Jim his sweetness and Felder's Josie her depth of understanding and her superhuman strength to go on. In these hands, O'Neill's play is both hilarious and heartbreaking: They go home with you, and they keep asking questions as you go about your day.

The devastation of Long Day's Journey, the last of O'Neill's plays to be staged, may be his final word about his own misbegotten upbringing. But A Moon for the Misbegotten was the last play he wrote -- and deep inside this drama there is hope.

Misery Loves this Company

The Orlando Weekly
by Al Krulick
Posted 3/04/05

Eugene O'Neill, one of America's greatest dramatists, wrote his last play in 1957, A Moon for the Misbegotten. It was a contradictory work – a unique blend of comedy, melodrama, autobiography and imagination that combined the farcical with the tragic and the illusory with the real. A failure in its first Drama Guild incarnation, it took another 10 years to reach Broadway. Such investigation into the ambiguous nature of mankind is mirrored in O'Neill's own opinion of the piece: At first he loved it, but later came to loathe it. Though never successful in his lifetime, A Moon for the Misbegotten has since become recognized as one of his greatest theatrical achievements.

The Orlando-UCF Shakespeare Festival has chosen Moon as its first venture into the O'Neill oeuvre, with David Lee as the play's sensitive and insightful director. And as performed by a trio of outstanding actors, all of the work's pathos, humor and affection remain intact, resounding honestly within the intimate confines of the festival's Goldman Theatre. This production is a superb rendering of the work, one that takes the audience on a compelling emotional journey.

O'Neill offered Moon for the Misbegotten as a sort of coda to his earlier semi-autobiographical tale, A Long Day's Journey Into Night, which introduced the doomed Tyrone family. In both dramas, the character of Jamie Tyrone is a stand-in for the true-life James O'Neill, Eugene's guilt-ridden, drunken older brother.

In Moon, we meet James again some 20 years later. A hopeless alcoholic and whoremonger, he has frittered his life away, acting in mediocre theatrical productions and spending his time in bars and boudoirs. Haunted by his past mistakes and dissolute living, James' only happiness is spending time with Phil and Josie Hogan, two tenant farmers living on land owned by James' father, now entrusted to him. Phil is a pixyish Irish mate whose love of liquor is equal to James'. Josie is his daughter, the overweight earth mother whom James seeks for conversation and company and finally for forgiveness.

Festival stalwart Eric Hissom stars as James, and once again proves his ability to tackle the large roles with intelligence and empathy. Here, he embodies the soul of a man whose hopelessness is masked by a self-deprecating wit ("When I poison 'em, they stay poisoned"), but whose deepest self-loathing must continually be swathed in a mind-numbing cataplasm of alcohol. Moving seamlessly from faux-villainous landlord to hung-over degenerate to self-flagellating sinner, Hissom's rendition of the tortured Tyrone is artful and convincing.

Robertson Carricart plays Phil Hogan with the right amount of earthbound humor and pugnacious charm. His love of money and drink is as strong as his Irishman's tendency for hatching schemes and taking swings. But it is his true affection for Josie that allows the human side of his character to shine through.

As Josie, the woman who describes herself as a "big ugly hulk," Susan Felder is nothing short of a revelation. Felder captures Josie's contradictions with an all-embracing charity and grace, revealing the desperate longing of a woman who wishes to be loved for herself yet knows that she'll never claim James as her own.

O'Neill has been chastised for the way his characters oscillate wildly between love and hate, attraction and repulsion, doubt and resolution, in the space of a few lines. But it is precisely these theatrical conventions that allow his audiences to explore the antipodal nature of the human soul. In Moon for the Misbegotten, these dynamics create a pulsing energy that finally resolves into an appropriate and gratifying conclusion.

Seasoned Actress Brings Lead Role To Life in O'Neill Play on Dysfunction

The Lakeland Ledger
By MICHAEL W. FREEMAN
Published Thursday, March 10, 2005

Susan Felder is an amazing presence on stage. The Chicago actress is now playing the role of Josie Hogan in the Orlando-UCF Shakespeare Festival's production of Eugene O'Neill's "Moon for the Misbegotten." Set in 1923, the play dramatizes Josie's life on a dilapidated Connecticut farm house. The plain-looking character has a sharp tongue and doesn't suffer fools gladly; when her conniving father, Phil Hogan, threatens to spank her in a drunken rage, she chases him out of the house with a stick.

Josie also has what used to be called a ruined reputation; she's not ashamed to admit that she's made herself available to any man who has expressed a bit of interest in her. But she also has a secret that would probably startle her worst critics.

Josie is a feisty and spirited woman, and Felder is an actress with so much talent that she makes the lonely Irish farmhand a mesmerizing person to watch. It's a great combination of a beautifully written character and a superb actress capable of bringing the role fully to life. Although there are two other significant characters in the play -- Robertson Carricart as Phil and Eric Hissom as James Tyrone Jr., Hogan's landlord and drinking companion, and both actors are wonderful -- this is Felder's show. It's hard to imagine anyone else in the role.

"Moon for the Misbegotten" is also a surprise coming from the author of "Beyond the Horizon," "The Iceman Cometh," "Desire Under the Elms" and "The Emperor Jones." Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was born in Boston to a theatrical family -- but not, as the history books usually note, a very happy one. O'Neill examined his own dysfunctional family in his classic drama "Long Day's Journey Into Night," an agonizing autobiographical play about a man frustrated in his career who failed as a husband and a father, a drug addicted mother, an alcoholic older son and a tubercular, sickly younger one.

While some of O'Neill's plays, like "The Long Voyage Home," "Mourning Becomes Electra" and "Long Day's Journey," attracted the attention of Hollywood and served as the basis for Academy Award-nominated films, "Moon," curiously, remains far lesser known. The Shakespeare Festival deserves great credit for reviving it.

The dark tragedian of the dramatic O'Neill plays, though, initially takes a back seat in the hour-long first act of "Moon," which looks not at his tragic childhood but his father's Irish Catholicism for inspiration.

When Josie's workday is interrupted by her loud and bombastic father, she gives as good as she gets -- better, perhaps. When he calls her a fat old cow, she doesn't hesitate to shut him up. For all of their feuding and Phil's bloody rants and bathos -- which makes for a pretty hilarious first act -it's clear that Phil truly depends on his daughter and would be lost without her.

Then Tyrone drops by for a drink and some company -- but is it company with drinking partner Phil, or Josie? As an off-handed joke, Tyrone threatens to sell his land and evict Hogan. A bluff? A nervous Phil isn't sure.

This very comic play takes a different approach in the two-hourlong second act. Eager to keep the farm, Phil schemes to take advantage of the seemingly mutual affection between his daughter and Tyrone.

So these two "misbegotten" lovers spend an evening together, drinking whiskey under the moonlight, eventually allowing the skeletons in their respective closets to come out. Tyrone reveals himself to be a very cynical man, and an alcoholic haunted by the death of his mother. Josie has a secret of her own.

The Shakespeare festival's flawless production can be appreciated on so many levels, from the game of one-upmanship that Phil and Tyrone play as they cautiously circle one another around the whiskey bottle, or in the startlingly good way that Felder turns Josie into such a rich and rewarding character -- almost a symbol for anyone who's ever felt too plain to be loved by someone else.

O'Neill's expert mix of Irish humor and tragedy, though, makes way for a truly poignant romance -- an early tear-jerker, if you will, but a very rewarding one. As Josie sits on the front steps of her ramshackle home, holding a drunken Tyrone as he falls asleep in her arms, the moment is captivating; the lighting is dimmed to indicate the scene is set in the middle of the night, and the theater crew provides sound effects -- a train whistling in the distance, a rooster crowing -- to enhance the mood. Even as Josie remains silent, it's clear she isn't sure if Tyrone will still be in her arms when the morning comes.

It's a beautiful moment in a play that remains surprisingly upbeat for so downbeat a writer as O'Neill. It's easy to see what appealed to the theater group when the play was chosen for the season. "Moon" is a real tribute to the human spirit, constantly in danger of being brutally broken.

                                                                 Last Updated: 05/06/2007                    Copyright Orlando Shakespeare Theater