Review: A MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN
By Toby Zinman
For the Inquirer
A Moon for the Misbegotten, Eugene O'Neill's last mighty play, is at the Independence Studio at the Walnut Street Theatre, about to start a fifteen-city tour. It is an exhausting play to watch (so long, so sad, so much blather about pigs, so many lies), so I can only imagine how exhausting it must be to perform. Even moreso if you are just recovering from a leg amputation, as Michael Toner is, after a hit-and-run accident seven months ago. He is a superb actor, and he plays Hogan with such twinkly charm, such authenticity and such a tasty Irish accent, that the performance would be a triumph without admiring his strength of will to return to the stage.
Hogan is a feisty farmer, living with his feisty daughter Josie (Angela Smith) in a shack in Connecticut. Jim Tyrone (Anthony Lawton) owns the land; he is a New York dandy, a drunk and dissolute, having squandered his life with whores and regret and grief. This is the same Jim Tyrone we know from Long Day's Journey Into Night, O'Neill's autobiographical masterpiece.
Moon – or at least its second act –is a long night's journey into day. After Josie and Jim confess their love in the moonlight, he sleeps on her breast until sunrise. This means that the lighting is crucial, and designer J. Dominic Chacon beautifully provides.
A new morning should signal the promise of hope, but Josie realizes it is too late for love or for hope; her first glimpse of Jim in the play, as he walks down the road toward the farm, is that he looks "Like a dead man walking slow behind his own coffin," and this image reveals the truth she has to face by the play's end. Lawton is impressive as the haunted, wrecked Jim, staring out into the void. Smith is not what O'Neill specified for Josie—oversized and overweight—but few actresses are; she is, instead, lovely if not an earth mother.
Andrew Thompson's set is surprisingly convincing: a wooden shack complete with interior rooms, front steps, and two side yards with boulders. Director Kate Galvin has managed, remarkably, to solve the problem of stagingthis big playin this little studio theatre space where the play's intimate arguments and confessions and desires all happen nearly in our laps.
But although this production is satisfying and moving, Galvin's Moon is sweeter and tamer than it needs to be; the characters lack rage and brutality, the scheming is transparent, class politics have been reduced to a joke, and existential "heebie-jeebies" have been medicated. The rough and bitter edges of these characters have been smoothed down, reducing O'Neill's tragic vision to merely sorrowful.
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Independence Studio on 3, Walnut Street Theatre, 9th & Walnut Sts. Through Feb.7. Tickets $35-45. Information: 215-574-3550 or walnutstreettheatre.org