Moon For The Misbegotten
written by Eugene O'Neill
Hapgood Theatre Company
Debut Season 2007-2008
Director: Josy Miller
Scenic Designer: Kim A. Tolman
Lighting Designer: Jason Miller
Costume Designer: Meghan Muser
Charge Scenic Artist: Kim A. Tolman
Scenic Artist: B. J. West
Notes on Moon:
Essentially a sequel to Long Day's Journey Into Night, A Moon For The Misbegotten continues the story of the older son, James Tyrone, Jr., a character based directly on O'Neill's brother Jamie. While the events of the play are fictional, its central conflicts are fundamentally autobiographical. The play is set in 1923, the year that Jamie O'Neill died from alcoholism, his disease so intense that he had lost much of his eyesight, his hair had gone totally white, and he had finally been admitted to a sanatorium. The story of his mother's that Jim discusses at length in Act III, is the most directly autobiographical moment in the play. Having struggled with morphine addiction since Eugene's birth, a struggle that is the primary conflict of Long Day's Journey, Ella finally overcame the habit after the death of her husband in 1920. Jamie did indeed give up drinking and made her care his primary focus for the next three years, until she died of a brain tumor in California. Jamie's steady decline resulted in the events listed above and his own death later that year. The Jim Tyrone of the play text is clearly on the same track, although in the playwright's reimagining of it, he is able to secure absolution and regain some of his crushed spirit and integrity.
The play's other details, while less directly autobiographical, are certainly informed by the lives of the O'Neills. The character of Phil Hogan, for instance, is at least a sketch of someone the family would have known. James, Sr. had a reputation within his family of getting regularly hosed in poor real estate deals with the Irish locals. The picture the Hogans paint of him in Act I is entirely substantiated by his family's reports: the "true Irish gentleman" would come around to get the year's worth of back rent, but end up drinking, singing and cursing the English with the tenants, never able to really be at odds with one of his fellow countrymen. Whether or not it was specifically with someone named Hogan, the relationship is certainly one that existed.
As for Josie, there is no direct autobiographical model for her character. Rather, she emerges from O'Neill's imagination as the catalyst for the salvation that his brother, in reality, was never granted. The picture of maternal care that neither Eugene nor Jamie got from their own mother, Josie represents the feminine ideal of O'Neill. In rewriting the story of his brother's death with her at its center, O'Neill has written a piece that critics and historians have described since its publication as an elegy for Jamie.