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A CurtainUp Review
A Moon for the Misbegotten
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May you have your wish and die in your sleep soon, Jim, darling. May you rest forever in forgiveness and peace..— Josie
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Kim Martin-Cotten (Josie Hogan) and Andrew May (James Tyrone)
(Photo credit: Photos by Jacob J. Goldberg) |
Kim Martin-Cotten certainly looks the part of Josie Hogan, the homely and ambiguously unchaste daughter of Phil, a poor tenant farmer. She’s large, big-boned, and has made herself peasant-like for this production. Unfortunately, her Josie is two-dimensional; she can’t extricate her character from the tedium that overwhelms her due to O’Neill’s hammering monotony and melodrama.
Dan Daily as Josie’s often-drunk yet conniving father falls into a similar trap. He’s too much of a clown — soft and buffoonish. He isn’t fearsome enough to convince us that all three of his sons have fled from servitude on his farm, in fear for their lives. Daily and dramaturg Kate Farrington can’t escape the easy stereotypes and humor that will subvert Daily’s character to a contemporary audience. In their hands, Phil Hogan is merely an indulgent old lush in a worn masquerade; O’Neill, I believe, wanted him to be so much more.
I was always conscious that Daily and Martin-Cotten were acting rather than inhabiting their roles. However, I was impressed with the work of Andrew May as Jim Tyrone, Jr., the good-natured yet troubled landlord of the Hogan farm. Tyrone is an alcoholic, misogynistic, mama’s boy — a Broadway actor who reveals unsavory details about himself in drunkenness. He’d be a train wreck in the wrong hands, but Mr. May, who strikes me as somewhat of a cross between Chris Noth and Patrick Warburton, modernizes the role, takes some chances and makes it interesting, while his compatriots Daily and Martin-Cotten get bogged down in the stereotypes of their respective characters.
Jo Winiarski’s minimalist set design perplexed me. The Hogan shanty is not fully serviceable as a set. The audience is required to imagine that walls are present when they are not. Characters retire in full view of the audience and the other actors. This could have been corrected easily by simply darkening them out, but Jaymi Lee Smith’s apathetic lighting design seemed like a phone-in.
Other aspects of the stage design were also frustrating. At one point, Josie speaks of a stew on the stove. Yet, we never see the stove, or the stew. The door to the shack is surrounded by enough blank space for one to walk through. In a famous scene where Phil and Josie rough up Harder (Kern McFadden), a smug young aristocrat, Tyrone hides in Josie’s room to listen and laugh at the proceedings. Yet, he’s right there, in plain sight of all, and ostensibly, Harder, to see. Except that we’re not supposed to see him. Again, some imaginative lighting would have helped the illusion.
Even more puzzling was the enormous amount of dark empty staging on either side of the set which could have been utilized to great effect. Lindsay Jones’s sound designs were mostly featureless, with the faintest of bird songs to signal night and the faintest of crickets to signal the dawn of a supposedly unparalleled new day.
All in all, this production has little to recommend it. At well over three hours, it may try the patience of the most tolerant theatregoer.
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A Moon for the Misbegotten By Eugene O’Neill Directed by J.R. Sullivan Cast: Kim Martin-Cotten (Josie Hogan), Sean McNall (Mike Hogan), Dan Daily (Phil Hogan), Andrew May, James Tyrone, Jr., Kern McFadden (T. Stedman Harder) Set Design: Jo Winiarski Costume Design: Rachel Laritz Lighting Design: Jaymi Lee Smith Sound Design: Lindsay Jones Dramaturg: Kate Farrington Fight Direction: Rod Kinter Assistant to the Director: Ryan Krause Production Stage Manager: Dale Smallwood Running Time: Three hours and twenty minutes, including two intermissions The Pearl Theatre Company,131 W. 55th St., NYC, www.pearltheatre.org From March 6, 2012 – April 15, 2012; opening March 18, 2012 at 7:30 p.m. Performance schedule : Tuesdays at 7:30pm, Wednesdays at 2:30 p.m., Thursdays at 7:30 p.m., Fridays at 7:30 p.m., Saturdays at 2:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m., Sundays at 2:30 p.m. Reviewed by William Coyle, based on the March 15, 2012 performance |
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