Patrick Lonergan explores the history of Eugene O'Neill's theatrical masterpiece A Moon for the Misbegotten, revived by Druid Theatre Company and coming to Gaiety Theatre this October for the Dublin Theatre Festival.
A Moon for the Misbegotten was the last play that Eugene O'Neill ever completed, and its elegiac tone makes it feel like it might have been his own unconscious farewell to playwriting. He described his play as a "fine, unusual, tragic comedy" – and its blend of humour and sadness is indeed both fine and unusual.
The play is deeply autobiographical, drawing on the figure of O’Neill’s brother Jamie, an actor who had drunk himself to death when he was only 45. Reimagining his brother as James Tyrone, O’Neill confines that character to a single place and a single 24-hour-period, so that he can grapple with the possibility of finding love with Josie, a young Irish-American woman.
What follows is a battle between both characters’ competing desires: for love, reputation, ownership of land – and for just one more drink.
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Irishness is central to those conflicts. The play’s stage directions say of Josie that the "map of Ireland is stamped on her face" – an old Irish-American saying that was intended to suggest distinctively Irish features. But in one of many connections between the two characters, the same phrasing is used to describe Tyrone too – not in Moon but in A Long Day’s Journey Into Night, a companion play that O’Neill wrote between 1939 and 1941, but which was not staged until after his death. That link reveals O’Neill’s desire to present Tyrone and Josie both as psychologically complex individuals and as emblematically Irish. Writing about them thus became a way for him to map Ireland, and to think about its multifaceted influence on American life.
That theme is apparent from the first act, when Josie and her father – a tenant farmer called Phil Hogan – are trying to frighten off a neighbouring landowner. They do so by playing on the stereotypes associated with their nationality: they are buoyant and comical – but also menacing, as if their buffoonery could tip into violence at any moment. They are, in other words, like characters in a stage Irish play.
O’Neill was certainly familiar with Irish characters on the American stage. His father James O’Neill had acted in an American production of Boucicault’s The Colleen Bawn almost immediately after he emigrated there from Kilkenny in the 1860s. And while O’Neill was struggling to establish his own career in the 1910s and 1920s, he was all too aware of the massive popularity of sentimental Irish stories. One of the most successful Broadway musicals of the 1920s, for example, was Irene – about a working-class Irish-American girl who wins the heart of a wealthy New Yorker when she is mistaken for a society girl. O’Neill thus had to grapple with the ongoing challenge that his American audiences had been conditioned to think about Ireland and the Irish in exceedingly narrow ways.
"I was ashamed to have my old mother's ears assaulted by the profanity and vulgarity of this play," wrote one journalist.
The first act of Moon therefore puts Irish stereotypes on display almost immediately. But rather than using them to belittle or exploit Ireland, O’Neill is instead doing something transformative: he is showing his American audiences that they are much too willing to believe in stage Irish cliches themselves. Irishness is not just an identity but a performance, he shows – something to be assumed, exaggerated and, when necessary, deployed for strategic gain.
Thus, in A Moon for the Misbegotten, the Irish on the American stage stop being types and stereotypes – they have finally become characters.
That shift was not immediately well received when the play premiered in 1947. Despite O’Neill’s insistence that it should have an Irish director and cast, early productions struggled – as seen in Ohio, where some performances were disrupted by Irish-Americans who found its combination of alcohol abuse, bad language, and sexual frankness too much to take. "I was ashamed to have my old mother’s ears assaulted by the profanity and vulgarity of this play," wrote one journalist.
More generally, post-war American audiences simply wanted a more optimistic version of Irishness in their theatres. One of the biggest Broadway hits of 1947 was Finian’s Rainbow, which is about an Irishman who flees to America after he steals a crock of gold from a leprechaun – only to be pursued by that leprechaun, who eventually decides to become human and settle down with a nice American girl. The musical isn’t all whimsy and fantasy (it features a strikingly subversive subplot about racism, for example) but it is unashamedly uninterested in representing the real Ireland. In that context, it’s not surprising that audiences were bewildered by A Moon for the Misbegotten at first.
It was only when the play finally made it to New York in 1957 (four years after O'Neill’s death) that it began to be recognised on its own terms. Audiences were now able to read it alongside Long Day’s Journey – and to understand how both plays use Irishness not as the butt of a joke but as the basis for drama that has a daringly honest psychological complexity. There was also the fact that the Irish American experience was evolving: just four days after Moon opened in New York, a new kind of story began to dominate the headlines when John F. Kennedy, the junior senator from Massachusetts, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Profiles in Courage, boosting his profile ahead of the campaign that would eventually take him to the White House. Suddenly, the possibilities available to Irish-Americans seemed much vaster than ever before.
The gap of time between Boucicault’s The Shaughraun and O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten is roughly that of a single lifetime: eight decades, give or take. Yet these two plays – which together make up Druid’s "Strange Country: Ireland in America" season – chart a transformation that cannot be measured only in years. The move from Boucicault to O'Neill shows the Irish moving from the social margins to the centre of American life. Taken together, Boucicault and O’Neill reveal something vital: when America stages Ireland, it often does so in order to see itself better.
A Moon for the Misbegotten is at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin from October 1st - 4th - find out more here
