Set on a Connecticut farm in the 1930s, the play centers on Josie, a woman with a salty tongue and tarnished reputation, and her roguish father Phil, who together plot to swindle their alcoholic landlord James Tyrone Jr. A Moon for the Misbegotten is directed by Long Wharf Theatre's Artistic Director Gordon Edelstein and is designed by a group of accomplished designers, all making their Alley debuts, including legendary designer and Yale professor Ming Cho Lee.
A Moon for the Misbegotten begins previews Friday, January 12, opens officially Wednesday, January 17, and runs through Sunday, February 4. This is the first Alley production of an O'Neill play since the renowned Alley production of Long Day's Journey into Night with Ellen Burstyn.
Eugene O'Neill began working on A Moon for the Misbegotten shortly after he finished Long Day's Journey into Night. The play reintroduces the character of James Tyrone from Long Day's Journey into Night, the failed alcoholic actor, and focuses on his tenant neighbors, a scheming father and his daughter Josie. Josie's rough appearance, make her an unlikely candidate to find love-until her plan to swindle Tyrone goes awry and suddenly, over the course of one moonlit night, opens her up to the possibility of love. The play's recent Northeast revival of O'Neill's final masterpiece drew rave reviews. "Consider it a rare opportunity to see one of America's best plays,"Â wrote the New Haven Registrar.
Director Gordon Edelstein comments, "A Moon for the Misbegotten is one of the towering achievements of American drama. Its canvas is not large but is a profoundly moving expression of sin and forgiveness. At its core, Moon lives as a religious ritual of expiation and grace."Â
A Moon for the Misbegotten is generously supported by Fulbright & Jaworski L.L.P., The Humphreys Foundation and Alley Theatre's 2006-2007 season sponsor Continental Airlines, the official airline of Alley Theatre.
Barbara Gelb of The New York Times wrote: "A Moon for the Misbegotten was, it seems, a wish fulfillment of O'Neill's part. He had been unable to forgive his brother's outrageous behavior during the months before his death and would not visit him at the sanitarium. The play in one sense was a belated offering, two decades later, of redemption for his brother and expiation for O'Neill's own guilty lack of compassion at the time. The Moon O'Neill conjured was a Mass for the long-dead brother he had once dearly loved but had come to resent."Â
A Moon for the Misbegotten was first performed in Columbus, Ohio in 1947. It premiered on Broadway in 1957, but it wasn't until Jose Quintero's 1973 revival that it garnered critical recognition. A Moon for the Misbegotten has been performed four times on Broadway. A fifth Broadway production (transferred from London's Old Vic Theatre) will begin March 2007 featuring Kevin Spacey as James Tyrone, Jr.
O'Neill has generally been regarded as America's greatest playwright. He won four Pulitzer Prizes: Beyond the Horizon, Anna Christie, Strange Interlude and posthumously for Long Day's Journey into Night. He was America's first playwright of distinction and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936. The Alley has produced a number of O'Neill's plays, including: Desire Under the Elms (1949), The Iceman Cometh (1959), A Moon for the Misbegotten (1960), O'Neill's one-act In the Zone/Bound East for Cardiff (part of Friends and Lovers: Three One-Acts by Chekhov, O'Neill and Casey, 1961), Long Day's Journey into Night (1963, 1998), Ah, Wilderness! (1965, 1973) and Mourning Becomes Electra (1970).
The cast of A Moon for the Misbegotten includes Alley Theatre Company Actors James Black as James Tyrone, Jr. and Annalee Jefferies as Josie Hogan. Making their Alley debuts are Bill Raymond as Phil Hogan and Wynn Harmon as T. Stedman Harder. Also appearing as Mike Hogan is Brandon Hearnsberger (Alley's Much Ado About Nothing and Journey's End).
The design team for A Moon for the Misbegotten includes costume designer Jennifer von Mayrhauser (Alley Theatre debut, Broadway's Rabbit Hole); scenic designer and recipient of the National Medal of Arts, Ming Cho Lee (Alley debut, Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival); lighting designer Jennifer Tipton (Alley debut, Long Wharf's Mourning Becomes Electra); and sound design by Nick Borisjuk (Alley debut, assistant on Broadway's Drowsy Chaperone, Off-Broadway, The Clean House). -- www.alleytheatre.org
Posted January 10th, 2007 by ruzik_tuzik
