Pieces of a dream
ACT's production of A Moon for the Misbegotten settles family scores.

By Robert Avila

A MOON FOR the Misbegotten, whose best qualities are on display in American Conservatory Theater's current production, continues Eugene O'Neill's exhuming of his past, the exorcising of ghosts that took an overtly autobiographical form in the posthumously produced Long Day's Journey into Night. Picking up the story of his older brother Jamie (called Jim Tyrone in both plays), O'Neill sets his final year of alcoholic decline in a half-fanciful setting whose tragicomic plot comes with subtle expressionist overtones.

Jim (Marco Barricelli), a washed-up actor and alcoholic consumed by guilt and remorse, gains a modest income as landlord to a poor and irascible Irish tenant farmer, Phil Hogan (Raye Birk). Jim has an offer for the property from Hogan's neighbor, a rich oilman named Harder (David Arrow), who's desperate to be rid of him. Meanwhile, Hogan has cooked up a plan whereby Jim will be forced to wed Hogan's plain and overgrown daughter Josie (Robin Weigert).

Jim's anguished heart actually seeks out the kind and vivacious Josie, a strapping tomboy of a farmer's daughter with wit, vigor, and a trashy reputation to match. For her part, Josie is proud of her disrepute, being no one's fool – except possibly that of Jim, whom she secretly adores. Awaiting the hour of their previously arranged moonlight tryst, Josie finds herself thinking of revenge instead of love when news arrives that Jim has agreed to sell the farm to Harder. Before the play ends, however, it moves into another mode entirely as Jim unburdens his conscience to Josie under cover of night and a deep and volatile bout of drinking.

Moon thus has its several phases, combining the comic, macabre, and tragic with an autobiographical impetus that amounts to a communion with the dead. Anyone who thinks of O'Neill as invariably grim will be taken aback by the opening act's effortless comedy, its sparkling quips and barbs, and the priceless scene in which the underdog Hogans give their snooty aristocratic neighbor his comeuppance when he dares complain about their pigs polluting his ice pond.

But as much momentary delight as Jim takes in Harder's dressing down, he's a shadow of himself. Indeed, he's "like a dead man walking slow behind his own coffin," as Josie calls him with poetic precision. This and other references assure us that a corpse is just what Jim is. The more O'Neill's play roots itself in biography, the more it calls forth elements of a dream play.

This is an aspect scenic designer Robert Mark Morgan brings out thoroughly in the Hogans' farmhouse, a rapturously ramshackle affair completely opened to the audience as well as to the turbid sky and dilapidated fence at the back of the stage. As evening descends, an enormous moon – itself a mixture of realistic detail and phantomlike presence – drifts in increments across the sky through smoky wisps of cloud.

Director Laird Williamson's confident direction and superb cast negotiate this shifting terrain remarkably well. Birk's Phil Hogan is a real treat, while Weigert (a regular as Calamity Jane on HBO's Deadwood) is simply luminous as Josie. Vis-à-vis Barricelli, Weigert beautifully conveys the complex feelings Jim calls forth in Josie, as the physically powerful young woman delicately ministers to the turbulent soul thrashing around before her. And strolling onstage in the well-made but fragile disguise of the playboy actor and bon vivant, Barricelli's towering Jim is a force field of concentrated self-destruction and barely stifled anguish. At the same time, he and Weigert somehow manage to make us believe Jim can be cradled in Josie's arms, in a kind of bourbon-soaked pietà. (The production, which successfully reunites director Williamson with Barricelli in the role of Jim after ACT's 1999 production of Long Day's Journey into Night, marks the final bow in San Francisco for this ACT core company actor. His commanding qualities and consistently brilliant work at the Geary will be greatly missed.)

It's hardly necessary to go beyond the play to understand Jim as a ghost, a doomed and tortured soul in an agony of remorse. However, when O'Neill wrote this play, his older brother was in fact long dead. The confession Jim makes to Josie in the forbidding moonlight corresponds to Jamie's own story, just as the forgiveness he receives from Josie is the belated expression O'Neill could not manage at the time. And so Moon expiates the guilt of both playwright and brother, a settling of accounts in the alternately gloomy and luminous tones of a play that straddles time, like a dream or a séance, with a kind of benediction that brings a long night's journey into day.

'A Moon for the Misbegotten' runs through May 29. Wed/11-Sat/14, May 17-21, and 24-28, 8 p.m. (also Wed/11, Sat/14, May 21, 25, and 28, 2 p.m.); Sun/15, May 22, and 29, 2 p.m., Geary Theater, 415 Geary, S.F. $11-$68. (415) 749-2228, www.act-sf.org.