A Moon for the Misbegotten
Starring Kevin Spacey, Colm Meaney and Eve Best
Brooks Atkinson Theater, Broadway
Review by Cahir O’Doherty

EUGENE O’Neill isn’t known for levity, but the Old Vic’s astonishing new production of his last play, A Moon for the Misbegotten, now playing on Broadway at the Brooks Atkinson Theater, is a festival of wit that establishes once and for all that it belongs to the first rank.

Josie Hogan, the ungainly “almost giantess” at the center of O’Neill’s play, is easily one of the most tragic characters in 20th century American drama. That she is also one of the funniest and most multi-faceted is a tribute to O’Neill’s artistry.

Heartrendingly played by accomplished British actress Eve Best, the Old Vic’s celebrated production wisely places her character at the heart of the drama the sometimes still but certainly unmovable object in the eye of the storm.

O’Neill’s last great play has had an interesting journey toward critical acceptance. Originally somewhat scorned as second rate, a saturnine exercise in self-pity, later productions including a relatively recent one featuring Gabriel Byrne and Cherry Jones have rescued it from its unwieldy reputation, mining the text for humor and subtlety that was often missed or overlooked before.

Watching the Old Vic’s production, you will be glad that Kevin Spacey, the venerable theater’s artistic director, understood that he had the perfect play and cast to highlight the talents he had assembled.

In O’Neill the American theater produced its first true artist playwright. There is no denying the thematic depth, resonance and artistic subtlety of his major works for the theatre.

In A Moon for the Misbegotten, he is working at the very height of his powers. And that saturnine note — a pervasive melancholia that haunts his characters and the tome of his plays — is held at bay here, chiefly by the pathetic efforts of Josie Hogan to give the man she loves at least one bright morning.

Jim Tyrone, the playwright tells us, is a malcontent, a “man walking behind his own hearse.” Inconsolable after the lonesome death of his beloved mother, and painfully aware of his own shortcomings as an artist, he’s a toxic mixture of pride and anguish that Spacey gives to us with guileless abandon.

Tyrone wants a savior but he doesn’t believe he can be saved. He wants a lover but he discovers he cannot really love others. He’s a hollow man, a walking husk and deep down he knows it.

Only Josie still believes in him, and in the role Best shows us with stunning virtuosity how much it costs her to sustain this belief. Time after time we see her smiling bravely to disguise her pain, arguing gamely to distract others from looking too closely, and persuading others so brilliantly that at times she even fools herself.

But in her private moments she collapses, sometimes literally, and then O’Neill gently shows us how her appetite for love has become her only real sustenance — and the only sustenance that she is continually denied.

As Josie’s father, the esteemed Irish actor Colm Meaney excels. Playing the ruthless, scheming Irish patriarch — a formidable rogue who drinks and thinks too much, a man who uses bourbon to forget but still finds that he can’t — he commands the stage and this production so charismatically that the role might as well have been written for him.

Meaney brings the play an authenticity that only a native Irishman can, relaying the cadences of Irish speech and crucially retaining the ability to find humor even in the most trying of circumstances.

On the night the audience was moved by Meaney’s portrayal of fatherly love and devotion to his only daughter. The barely concealed pain beneath that comic exterior only glinted on the surface, where it was reflexively and only momentarily dimmed by combat or drunkenness.

The first act of the play is a rare festival of wit which these skilled actors play for its unexpected reserves of humor. O’Neill is certainly not known for his levity, but this play and this production give the lie to that aloof reputation.

A searingly painful threnody on the quest for a little hope, and the appallingly high price of that hunger, the Old Vic’s astonishing new production is the most interesting new production on Broadway and should not be missed.