Reviews 2009
Reviews 2009
✭✭✭✭✭
by Eugene O’Neill, directed by Joseph Ziegler
Shaw Festival, Court House Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
May 23-October 9, 2009
"A Long Day’s Journey into Dawn"
The Shaw Festival is staging its second play by Eugene O’Neill after its successful presentation of “Ah, Wilderness!” in 2004. “A Moon for the Misbegotten” was written between 1941-41 and first performed in 1947. It serves as a kind of sequel to O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey into Night” (written in 1941) by showing us what happens to James Tyrone, Jr. (now called “Jim” instead of “Jamie”) after the events of the earlier play. The Festival gives it a gripping production with superb performances from the entire cast. People who tend to think of O’Neill’s plays as being depressing will not be prepared for the uproarious comedy that dominates the first half of the play. Yes, the story does become serious but the overall effect is a sense of a final reconciliation with the past that functions as a release. In terms of setting and structure “A Moon for the Misbegotten” could be viewed as “A Long Day’s Journey into Dawn.”
The action is set outside a run-down farmhouse in Connecticut in 1923, eleven years after the events in “Long Day’s Journey”. Jim’s father James Tyrone, Sr., and his mother Mary have both died and his younger brother Edmund has moved away. Jim has a dark secret that is tearing him apart and pushed him deeper into alcoholism, but what it is is not revealed until very near the end of the play. Jim, however, does not become the focus of the play until the second act. The first act focusses almost entirely on the riotous relations of the Irish immigrant Hogan family that rent the house from Jim and the feud they have with their wealthy neighbour, T. Stedman Harder, who wants to buy the farm from Jim so he can expand his own property and evict the trouble-making Hogans.
The play begins with the escape of Mike, the youngest and last of Phil Hogan’s sons, who can’t stand the beatings and ravings of his perpetually drunken father any longer or the shame of living with his sister who has the reputation in town as a whore. Mike is sorry that he is now stranding Josie as the only child left to deal with Phil, but he knows he has to get away so he can begin to live. When Jim drops by he is more like an old friend than a landlord. He gets along better with Phil and Josie than he does with the city folk he usually associates with. Beneath her rough exterior it’s clear that Josie is smitten with Jim but is convinced that she could never complete with the beauties that Jim knows in the city. What’s most important for Phil is that Jim promises never to sell the farm to anyone but him. A visit from T. Stedman Harder to complain about the Hogan’s pigs overrunning his land ends in Phil Hogan’s beating Stedman and frightening him out of wits. While this is an hilarious joke for Phil, it only impels Stedman to get rid of the Hogan’s as soon as he can. The main twist in the plot comes when Phil returns from the local pub claiming he heard Jim promise to sell the farm to Stedman. Knowing that Jim has a soft spot for Josie, he hatches a scheme whereby Josie will offer herself to Jim, even to the point of getting him in bed, whereupon Phil will confront him and force Jim into marrying Josie or at least give him compensation, the farm, for his base intentions. This puts Josie in an impossible situation by setting a mercenary face her unconditional love for Jim.
The entire cast gives superlative performances but what will likely surprise frequent Shaw Festival-goers is Jim Mezon’s turn as Phil Hogan. We’ve seen him as Andrew Undershaft (1998) in “Major Barbara”, Boss Mangan in “Heartbreak House” (1999), Shaw’s Julius Caesar (2002) and Henry Higgins (2004) and outside the Festival as Werner Heisenberg in “Copenhagen” (2004). While always commanding immense power on stage, none of these roles, especially as Shaw’s eloquent rationalists, will prepare you for the pure, unbridled comedy he creates. He plays Hogan as a character of Falstaffian proportions, not in shape as much as in hilariously outsized nature of everything he does from drinking, sweating and cussing to boasting, laughing, conniving, feigning repentance and threatening vengeance. He’s a clown with a vicious streak, a tyrant and a baby all at once. It’s an amazing, massively entertaining performance from first to last.
In the key role of Josie is played by Shaw newcomer Jenny Young. It’s true she is not the plain, bosomy big-boned girl that O'Neill describes, but then a glance at photos of famous productions of the past reveals that few Josies have fully fit O’Neill’s description. Her lack of beauty does not have to a fact but rather part of her negative view of herself, just as her supposed sluttishness is a rumour she has deliberately encouraged. Jenny Young completely succeeds in creating a Josie with a seemingly impervious exterior of roughness in speech and action, born of years of combating her father. Yet, she crucially shows us Josie’s vulnerability beneath this exterior, that there have been years of dreams she has denied herself for fear of disappointment. No matter how much she denies it, when Jim says he sees more beauty in her than she knows, we know he is right. As the tension builds throughout the second act, our heart goes out to her character, caught as she is in the terrible dilemma her father has created for her.
The third important player is David Jansen as Jim. At first he may seem a little too smooth, a little too cool for the role, but that is merely the defensive front his character puts up, a city-boy style that seems out of place in the country. Once Jim returns to Josie in Act 2 and the confessions begin, Jansen digs deeper into his character than I’ve seen before and the humiliation his revelations bring him and rawness of his shame are painful to watch. His long interaction with Josie in Act 2 is really like a long dance of changing decisions of what to hide, what to reveal, until a sad kind of reconciliation is achieved.
Director Joseph Ziegler has directed the work with a masterful hand especially in turning the corner ever so subtly from the raucous comedy of the beginning to dark night of sadness and the coldness of dawn of the ending. Billy Lake as Mike Hogan and Patrick McManus as T. Stedman Harder make every word of their small roles count in setting up the action. Christina Poddubiuk’s design is detailed and very well broken down right to the point of showing the stain where the continually sweating Hogan habitually puts his head in his favourite chair. Louise Guinand’s lighting expertly creates mood as well as signalling the the passage of time, so crucial to the play’s symbolism.
Outside of opening nights, patrons at the Shaw Festival are far more reserved about giving standing ovations than patrons are at the Stratford Festival, where they occur so often as to be meaningless. Therefore, when after a long pause the audience at an ordinary matinee at the Court House Theatre spontaneously stood to acknowledge the heroic work Mezon, Young and Jansen had done in bringing O’Neill’s play to life, one could only agree that one had seen something truly outstanding. Let’s hope for more explorations of this American master in future.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Jenny Young and David Jansen. ©Emily Cooper.
2009-08-15
A Moon for the Misbegotten