New Play in Manhattan

A Moon for the Misbegotten was Eugene O'Neill's last play. Finished in 1943, it had a turbulent pre-Broadway road tour in 1947 and closed out of town. Whatever production difficulties it encountered, A Moon has internal troubles that go much deeper. In the current production, three accomplished actors cannot save, or even for long sustain, the play. Nor is the general effect one of crude mass: it is much more one of sheer dead weight. O'Neill's greatest fault--using too many and too flaccid words--flattens out a story that is at best never intense enough; it evokes, not the shock of living drama, but the ghost of other plays.

Taking place about ten years after Long Day's Journey into Night, A Moon reintroduces the hard-drinking older O'Neill brother, James Tyrone Jr. Jim Tyrone is by now a wholly dissipated, used-up drunk, his last reserves gone with the death of his mother. The sweet, healthy, hulking daughter of an Irish tenant farmer, a virgin who pretends to be a wanton, has long been wildly in love with Jim. The two come together alone one night, but beyond a quickly aborted impulse of drunken lust in Jim, nothing happens. Partly from knowing he must spoil her life by sharing it, and even more from having nothing left inside to share, Jim goes away for good.

In some raffish first-act comedy, and very fitfully thereafter, when Wendy Hiller and Franchot Tone give urgency to O'Neill's clouded scenes, or give a face to his sense of lostness, A Moon stirs to life. But mostly it lies dead; and something a little too decent in everyone's basic motives makes A Moon soft as well as enfeebled. There is no tumble and toss of sick, bitter, angry, thwarted, even petrified emotions. Everywhere there is a sense of O'Neill's honest compassion, but nowhere is there anything incandescently imagined or inextinguishably remembered. Words fumble through fog, or have a dated slanginess which, lacking all poetry, sinks almost to parody:

You're the goods, Kid . . . I know what you want, Bright Eyes. Come on, Baby Doll, let's hit the hay.

Carmen Capalbo's staging, like the acting, is wholly in the service of the play. Irish Actor Cyril Cusack is richly humorous and yet realistic as Josie's sly, disreputable father. At his best, Franchot Tone is a memorably quiet Jim. Wendy Hiller, not seen on Broadway since The Heiress, again gives a beautiful performance, again raises, through no fault of her own, a small demur. Glowingly vital and magnetic, Actress Hiller could never really quite seem a colorless, mousy heiress, nor seems now an oversized half-freak. Her acting brings some of its most resonant moments to O'Neill's play, but never quite authenticates the plight of O'Neill's heroine. Doomed or bedeviled Wendy Hiller might seem, but misbegotten never.

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