A Moon for the Misbegotten is the last of the trilogy of stirring autobiographical works that Eugene O’Neill wrote in the decade or so before his death in 1953, that also includes Long Day’s Journey into Night and The Iceman Cometh. At the heart of the play is a tortured love story between Josie Hogan, a farmer’s daughter with a brash temperment and a promiscuous reputation, and Jim Tyrone, who lives next door and also happens to be her father’s landlord. Jim harbours feelings for Josie, but he is plagued by shame at his own wasted life, and by guilt and grief in the wake of his mother’s death, demons that he vainly tries to dampen with determined drinking.
A Moon for the Misbegotten is a sort of epilogue to O’Neill’s masterpiece, Long Day’s Journey into Night, as the character of Jim is none other than the same James Tyrone, son of James and Mary Tyrone, whose tragic family trauma was played out over the long night almost exactly eleven years before.
As we record this episode a new production of A Moon for the Misbegotten is on stage at the Almeida theatre in London, the first in the capital for nearly twenty years. It is directed by Rebecca Frecknell and stars Ruth Wilson and Michael Shannon as the doomed couple.
I am delighted to be joined to explore the play by O’Neill expert, Beth Wynstra, who is an Associate Professor of English at Babson College in the United States.
