by Eugene O’Neill
Directed by Joseph Ziegler
At the Court House Theatre
April 28-October 9, 2009

    Written in 1943, A Moon for the Misbegotten failed on its tryout tour by the Theatre Guild in 1947, and became a success only with the Broadway version of 1974, starring Colleen Dewhurst, Jason Robards, Jr., and Edward Flanders under Jose Quintero’s sensitive direction. One of O’Neill’s greatest plays, it is a story of the thwarted love of two misbegotten people: Josie Hogan (who believes herself unattractive because of her big, lumpy physique and her lot in life as the daughter of a widowed and impoverished farmer) and James Tyrone, Jr. (the alcoholic son of a miserly former actor and a drug addicted mother). The two yearn for each other and for a romance that is a softening of and an escape from their reality. Both feel tainted and inadequate, with Josie attempting to mask her shame by acting promiscuous, even though she is a virgin, and with James often going on severe benders and frequenting tarts. James is so curdled with despairing guilt and self-loathing as to seem depraved in his death-in-life. He is really looking for forgiveness, and Josie could be the one to understand and love him.

   At times squalid and sordid, the play is shot through with poetic tenderness and its drama is balanced against robust comedy. The 1974 Broadway version achieved this balance wonderfully and even had grandeur, with three superb performances that have become legendary. Alas, Joseph Ziegler’s production is a dud. Desperately comic, vulgarly clichéd, rhetorically shrill, and utterly hollow, it is either loud or bland and never poetic or powerfully affecting. Most of the blame can be shared by the three principal performers, none of whom seems to be in the same dramatic universe as the others, and none of whom has more than a tenuous connection to O’Neill’s play. Jenny Young’s Josie would not be out of place in a play by Ann Chisholm. Slight of frame and unable to suggest any of the character’s dichotomies, she is a lightweight Josie literally, figuratively, and theatrically. If she is of the earth, it is the earth of rural Ontario—plain and chaste far more than warm, hearty, and sexual. David Jansen’s Jamie has absolutely no resemblance to O’Neill’s hard drinking, shame faced cynic. He sounds bland and repressed rather than cracked with despair and melancholy. Even the much-needed “hamminess” of the character is restrained to the point of nullity, as if the actor has given up altogether in trying to reach down to the humanity of a very anomalous man. Jim Mezon is strongly physical as old Hogan, but it is much the same sort of physicality that this actor has shown before, only amplified two-fold and not shaded by sorry slyness or loneliness. Mezon roars most of the time and staggers and stumbles about as if playing a character out of Erskine Caldwell. As I said before, there are three different worlds on stage, none of which belong fully to O’Neill.

   I liked Christina Poddubiuk’s set more than I did Ben Edwards’ Broadway original, and I also liked Louise Guinand’s lighting. But that was it. The rest was misbegotten. 

photo: Emily Cooper

pic: Jenny Young (Josie), David Jansen (foreground) (James Tyrone, Jr.), Jim Mezon (old Hogan)



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