Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten is a beautiful, sad, humane play about broken people and the possibility of redemption. It’s also dated and demanding: its pace is slow, and its intimate study of drunkenness and self-loathing can feel recursive, claustrophobic.
One O’Neill scholar, Travis Bogard, pretty much summed up the tone of critical consensus when he declared the play “doomed to failure without superb acting”.
Lorcan Cranitch and Eileen Walsh, who play the main roles of Phil Hogan and his daughter, Josie, in Druid theatre company’s new production, talk to The Irish Times in their fourth week of rehearsals.
“The brave thing to do is just perform it without editing it,” Walsh says. Cranitch agrees. “We love the play. Our job as actors is to get out of the way of it.”
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The drama, which O’Neill completed in 1943, is set on a farm in rural Connecticut, where Phil and Josie hatch a scheme to entrap their neighbour, Jim Tyrone – played by Marty Rea – into marrying her, hoping he will offer a way out of their poverty. But over the course of one desperate, alcoholic night, unexpected desires and revelations emerge.
The demands of its central roles are part of the reason the play isn’t frequently staged. Ruth Wilson, who played Josie in Rebecca Frecknall’s London production last year, has said that the part was more draining even than Second Woman, the endurance piece in which she performed the same scene on a loop for 24 hours.
Eileen Walsh, who has also performed both roles, tends to agree. With Second Woman each scene resets, and a new actor brings a new energy and an unexpected response. “You’re constantly being refuelled by another character’s unexpected or outrageous choices,” she says. “You have to stay alive and responsive to what is happening in front of you.”
A Moon for the Misbegotten, which moves to Dublin Theatre Festival after its opening run in Galway, offers no such reset. The tension accumulates, scene by scene, as the characters conceal things from one another while simultaneously trying to reveal a part of themselves. For the actor playing Josie, it means sustaining an increasingly intricate psychological performance, keeping track of each mounting layer.
A friend of Crantich’s would check in during rehearsals to ask, “How’s your heart? Is your heart all right?” The answer is that the heart is fine but the head is exhausted. “Your body is fine. Your body won’t be exhausted. You can do that. Look after your brain. There’s a lot of trauma in here, a lot of trickery.”
The difficulty comes from having to keep track of what each character wants, what they’re trying to achieve and what they’re concealing. That creates an enormous amount of mental work for the actors. They have to know not only what they are playing for the audience but also what they are withholding, revealing or pretending within the world of the scene.
A Moon for the Misbegotten, which follows Druid’s run of The Shaughraun, is the second production in the company’s Strange Country: Ireland in America season. On the surface the two plays could hardly be more different. Dion Boucicault’s The Shaughraun is big, boisterous melodrama, with a large cast, music, villains and heroes; A Moon for the Misbegotten, which was O’Neill’s final play, is an intimate, ambiguous family tragedy, played out between three people over its single night. But the pairing brings out subterranean affinities.
“What I’m also discovering is that there’s a way of presenting this play that isn’t entirely removed from melodrama,” Cranitch says. “There are some genuinely powerful melodramatic moments in it. Personally, I find that very interesting, because there’s a certain theatrical gesture to the play that goes beyond realism. It’s larger than realism. In many ways I think of it almost as a poem.”
There’s a strong possibility that Eugene O’Neill’s father would have seen, or even performed in, Boucicault’s plays. You can feel the influence. A Moon for the Misbegotten begins in a very Boucicaultian way, almost like a musical comedy, with the plot established quickly and the goodies and baddies clearly defined.
“But then, as you move through the four acts, you see this extraordinary history of theatre unfolding,” Walsh says. The play “becomes increasingly sparse, moving from the musical into something much closer to real life, and then into an abstract, beautiful, dreamlike world. In that sense, O’Neill takes us from Boucicault to Beckett.”
“When people are ready for this play, it is a balm on them,” Cranitch says. “And so to time it with The Shaughraun is beautiful. You come in, you have the laughs, you have the energy, the adrenaline of standing and cheering and getting the baddies, letting goodies win and all that. And then you sit and you watch and you absorb and you see yourself.”
The unusual precision of O’Neill’s directions allows the actors a different kind of interpretative freedom. In one instance he describes Jim beginning to tell a story but needing to stop and take a breath because he has to recount it from a distance, as though it happened to someone else. “It is an amazing psychological detail,” Cranitch says.
The same is true of the father’s drunkenness in the second act. O’Neill specifies the state he is in: drunk enough to be affected by it but not so drunk that he loses awareness of what he’s saying. He moves in and out of that state according to what he needs to communicate to his daughter.
The writer’s attention throughout the play to the nuances of the alcoholic experience is remarkable. There’s a particularly revealing line when Josie tells him, “You’re letting yourself be drunk.” It captures something precise about her perception of her father and also feels true: drunkenness is a malleable medium, something you can surrender to or resist. You can allow yourself to fall into it or attempt to maintain some degree of sobriety and so some degree of control.
For an actor that creates an almost painterly process. “O’Neill has a canvas he wants painted in a particular way,” Cranitch says. “You need different colours for different moments, not just one consistent emotional state but a whole range of shades within a single scene.”
The task, then, is finding freedom within the constraints.
O’Neill’s physical descriptions of his characters are also incredibly, and at times bafflingly, precise. Jim Hogan is 5ft 6in, with red, thinning hair. Josie is dark-haired, freckled and sunburnt, 28 years old, 5ft 11in and 180lb, with broad, sloping shoulders and a muscular build. Then comes the amusingly dated qualification: “But there is no mannish quality about her. She is all woman.”
Taken as external requirements, these details would make casting Josie almost impossible. The trick, Walsh says, is to take O’Neill’s specifications and discover how they live in the body.
“I think it’s about feeling and what she carries,” she says – a deep self-loathing and the conviction that someone like Jim could never find her attractive. She has grown up around men, violence, drinking and farming; she is capable and physically strong, but those qualities have shaped the way she sees herself.
“She doesn’t see herself as being dainty or womanly,” Walsh says. “Because she can’t allow herself to be that for fear of being fragile or taken advantage of. There’s no actress who would be specific to it or ideal to it on paper. But when you get the right one, she’ll pull it off.”
The rehearsal room has its own unusual atmosphere. It’s very different from that for The Shaughraun, which involved a large cast and the collective challenge of finding its comedy. There were days when it felt almost impossible to make the thing work, the actors say. There were so many moving parts that it was technically outlandish. A Moon for the Misbegotten is smaller and quieter; its complexity is entirely psychological.
“I don’t know if I’ve ever seen Garry so enthused,” Walsh says of the production’s director, Garry Hynes. “It’s complicated and it’s hard, but it’s the right time and the right place.”
For Cranitch, part of what makes the process productive is the spirit of experimentation. “Finding the answers isn’t something that one person has,” he says. Hynes will sometimes offer an idea simply as a possibility: “Look, I’m just throwing this out here, I don’t know.” “And that’s a really creative place to be,” the actor says, “when we’re all saying, ‘Look, we’re open to everything’.”
It’s a play in which nobody quite gets what they think they want. Its title says it all: missed chances, missed connections, missed lives. Each character has spent years protecting themselves from the thing they need, trying to deny their desire.
“They all need something,” Walsh says, “and they need each other more than they actually realise.”
By the end, some of those defences fall away. Jim can return to the ether; Josie is reborn into something new. This is ultimately what makes this difficult, old-fashioned, deeply strange play so exciting for both actors to take on. It’s a love story, but what makes it moving is that it’s a love story inhabited by characters who’ve spent their lives believing themselves unworthy of love. For one night they’re given the possibility that they might be wrong.
A Moon for the Misbegotten is at the Town Hall Theatre, Galway, until Saturday, September 26th, then at the Gaiety, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival, from Thursday, October 1st, until Sunday, October 4th
