DeVita seeks light in ‘Moon for Misbegotten’
She’s described as “so oversize for a woman that she is almost a freak”; she repeatedly calls herself promiscuous but is actually a 28-year-old virgin.
In his 40s and looking older, he’s described as “a dead man walking slow behind his own coffin;” while he can act like a prude about sex, he’s slept with more women than he can count.
This is the show about love that Writers Theatre in Glencoe chose to open on Valentine’s Day?
Eugene O’Neill’s star-crossed romance between Jamie Tyrone (Wisconsin mainstay Jim DeVita) and Josie Hogan (Bethany Thomas) — a dissolute landlord and his farmer-tenant’s daughter — isn’t going to fit on a Hallmark card.
But under William Brown’s direction, this three-plus hour tour of O’Neill’s “A Moon for the Misbegotten” — a sequel of sorts to “Long Day’s Journey into Night” and O’Neill’s last play — is indeed a love story. “Of a fashion,” as Jamie says.
Before the moon rises above these lonely souls on a September night in 1923 Connecticut, there’s an afternoon’s comedy in an hourlong first act — played here as well as I’ve seen it done. It usually tilts toward farce; in Brown’s sensitive hands, it occasionally resembles Chekhov.
Even as we laugh alongside Jamie, Josie and especially Josie’s father (an excellent A.C. Smith), it’s clear that the personae they project hide a great deal they won’t say, involving the love each of them feels for the other two — and the nagging sense they all have that they’re not worthy.
At the bottom of a long hill he’d already started down in “Long Day’s Journey,” Jamie feels least worthy of all. Despite a lingering touch of the poet, he’s so far gone in drink and dissipation that he can’t always even muster the requisite energy to hate himself.
And that’s how DeVita plays Jamie for much of the night, true to stage directions indicating that Jamie “talk mechanically” as he “goes along in an automatic way, as if only half-conscious of what he’s doing.” It’s a deliberately understated performance involving a shriveled husk of a man, already dead even as he goes through the motions of breathing.
Conversely, Thomas — a big woman who towers over DeVita — is an expressionist life force, telegraphing Josie’s struggle between fear and longing. Loathing her body and angrily sure no man could find her attractive, she helplessly hopes all the same — wondering whether Jamie might find the courage to love her, if he’d but learn to love himself.
It’s that hoping — and Thomas’ aching vulnerability — that I’ll most remember from this “Moon.” Misbegotten as Josie wrongly believes herself to be, she remains fiercely determined to take back the night and greet the dawn.
Her forgiving moonlight doesn’t just soothe a broken Jamie. It envelops us all, proving anew that love comes in many forms — and works in mysterious ways.
“A Moon for the Misbegotten” continues through March 18 at Writers Theatre, 325 Tudor Ct., Glencoe, Ill. For tickets, visit writerstheatre.org. Read more about this production at TapMilwaukee.com.