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In the program notes for Quantum Theatre’s “A Moon for the Misbegotten,” director J. Cody Spellman calls Eugene O’Neill’s final play “a director’s dream.”
That assessment might surprise some. “Moon” was long considered difficult to stage, and even a “failure.” Indeed, though it premiered in 1947, it seems to have been seldom produced until after the famed 1973 Broadway revival, starring Colleen Dewhurst and Jason Robards.
Despite subsequent revivals on Broadway and in London, it’s still not seen all that often around here; the most recent prior Pittsburgh production was in 2009, at Pittsburgh Public Theater.
Yet O’Neill remains one of the most important American playwrights and, as Quantum founder and artistic director Karla Boos writes, it was long past time for the 34-year-old company to stage one of his works.
Spellman calls “Moon” a play about “our innate capacity to choose life and love.” Melessie Clark and Wali Jamal play Josie and Phil Hogan, a woman and her father living on a rented, stingy-soiled farm in 1920s Connecticut. Brett Mack portrays James Tyrone, Jr., the dissolute heir who owns the land and is sweet on Josie.
I hadn’t seen the drama before, and the first thing that struck me was how funny the first act is. O’Neill is considered a pioneer of realism on the American stage, and his dialogue reminded me a bit of August Wilson’s in his ability to draw out the humor, poetry and shrewdness in everyday speech, as in this typically chop-busting exchange between Josie and Phil. It’s about Josie’s younger brother, to whom she’s just given cash stolen from the old man so the kid can flee home.
JOSIE: Sure, what do you care for money? You'd give your last penny to the first beggar you met — if he had a shotgun pointed at your heart!
HOGAN: Don't be teasing. You know what I mean. It's the thought of that pious lump having my money that maddens me. I wouldn't put it past him to drop it in the collection plate next Sunday, he's that big a jackass.
JOSIE: I knew when you'd calmed down you'd think it worth six dollars to see the last of him.
As the plot unfolds into something more tragic, these characters prove remarkably complex, and Clark, Jamal and Mack bring out their many facets. The atmosphere helps, too: Quantum’s traditional annual summer outdoor show sets up at Verona’s Longue Vue Club, with its spectacular view overlooking the Allegheny River.
From the bleacher-style seats, audiences can see the real moon over a wooded hillside, and hear hundreds of crickets and the occasional distant train horn add verisimilitude to the play’s rural setting. Meanwhile, the old-school golf club’s English-estate-style main building might as well belong to the play’s comically abused heavy, millionaire T. Steadman Harder, whom it’s also easy to imagine having shot the broken skeet dotting the grassy grounds.
None of O’Neill’s plays have been staged terribly often in Pittsburgh in recent years, including his most widely acknowledged masterpiece, “A Long Day’s Journey into Night.” This “Moon” is a rare chance to revisit, or catch up, as the case may be.
