Anguished Aria

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

A MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN by Eugene O'Neill

Eugene O'Neill was, supremely, a vernacular poet who found his most haunting rhythms in the profoundly mixed emotions of his characters, his most memorably dissonant sonorities in the muddled motives with which they confront memory, fate and each other. A Moon for the Misbegotten, his last completed play, is structurally the simplest of the late great work. It is also perhaps the most anguished, because O'Neill was searching so hard for a ray of hope in the dawn that completes this long night's journey into day.

The playwright sometimes substituted repetition for inspiration in his prolonged dying fall. He could seem like a drunk at a party who makes the other guests linger while he tries to find the point of a tale that is too long in the telling. But in recounting how Josie Hogan (Kate Nelligan) and James Tyrone Jr. (Ian Bannen) live out their 18-hour love affair (all the way from reluctant acknowledgment that it exists to equally reluctant renunciations), O'Neill created one of his most moving statements about how reality and dreams betray each other.

Tyrone is a failed actor with a tragedian's soul and a Broadway tinhorn's compulsion for self-abasement in bad booze and worse sex. Josie, the daughter of his Connecticut tenant farmer, has adopted the manner of a slut in order to hide her Madonna's heart. Their tragedy is that their one night of (sexless) love comes too late. From it they achieve not redemption but a brief, bittersweet memory; not" I enough, one suspects, to light their separate darkening paths into the future.

For this Broadway revival, the usually cool Nelligan has turned up the heat to blistering lev els. Raucous, tender and compelling, she is an astonishment, the perfect instrument for young English Director David Leveaux's energetic and often surprisingly humorous conception of the play. She is ably supported by grand, goatish Jerome Kilty as her ever scheming father, and there is an atmosphere of stark eloquence in Brien Vahey's set and in Marc B. Weiss's subtle lighting. Only Bannen lets down the side. He is an intelligent actor, but he never finds the fire in the ashes of his character. What should have been a duet is, as a result, too often an aria. But perfectly sung.

-- Richard Schickel