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Moon for the Misbegotten BY witney NEW YORK N Y May 4 Eugene ONeills last complete play was A Moon for the Misgotten an extension of his lsUUlto Atvu o oedy edy of the haunted ONeills The play deals with the alcohol ¬ ic driven elder brother of Long Days Jour ¬ ney Into Night at a period about 10 years after the latter play Carmen Capalbo and Stanley Chase present it at the Bijou Theatre as the second of their projected series there and one trusts that both of these admirable and talented young men as well as all au ¬ tomatic ONeill adorers will manage to forgive me if I think it is much too long for its conteint much too turgid for its message messageThe The Theatre Guild had this on tour at one time and because ONeill was by then too ill properly to cut and rewrite it was abandoned on tour He could not devote his talents to making the changes it needed and the Guild felt it better for all con ¬ cerned not to bring it into New York I confess I wonder if it should have been this time timeThis This is certainly not to say that it is a total waste It isnt It has moments of great beauty in which the old ONeill fer ¬ vor and poetry of language are observed but it plainly is the work of a man who no longer had the stamina to edit and dis ¬ cipline a play of this character The first of four acts is an hour long and accom ¬ plishes precious little beyond making it clear that an Irish farmer with an over ¬ sized and earthy blonde daughter is all but squatting on the land of the Tyrones that this same Irish farmers besotted driv ¬ ing has sent his three sons running away and that James Tyrone Jr James ONeill Jr has a kind of calling arrangement on the girl girlThe The second and third acts are played without intermission another lengthy New York Play Review stretch and the fourth act while short brings things to no clear conclusion how ¬ ever lovely its writing And it is lovely writing in this act The drunkenness and scheming and confusing philosophies straighten themselves out by this time and something better is at hand But all four acts are thick with the less attractive slang of 1923 and it grates being neither old enough to have charm nor young enough to match up The speeches of young Tyrone are filled with Nix on the raw stuff Why do I pull this rough stuff Nix kid and similar lame attempts to give the character articulateness in an unpleasant jargon jargonMiss Miss Wendy Hiller is warm and lovely as the farm girl convinced that she is un ¬ attractive who has invented a reputation for harlotry and venery but who is actu ¬ ally vestal and sensitive Her perform ¬ ance is a feat of speech and performance since she is on stage most of the time and talking in a running spate of ONeill words wordsCyril Cyril Cusack from Ireland and magnifi ¬ cent makes the bibulous grasping hard old farmer a touching portrait of drunken ignorance and bestiality bestialityFranchot Franchot Tones James Tyrone Jr has not the spaciousness nor the power of the performance of the same character in Long Days Journey Into Night ONeill by this time apparently saw his elder brother as a tormented bewitched man de ¬ stroying himself in liquor and women in some headlong flight from the nightmares of his childhood and his dead mother The character in the present play is con ¬ fusedly written confusedly played playedMr Mr Capalbo has directed with renewed demonstration That he is a brilliant young director able to fuse his players and his play into a credible whole which moves with purpose and arrives at point pointWilliam William Pitkins single setting of a tum ¬ bled shanty on a rocky Connecticut tenant farm is excellent excellentA A Moon for the Misbegotten is not as towering a play as Long Days Journey Into Night and this is a pity The two to ¬ gether if matching in force and grandeur would have made a gigantic monument for ONeill
