"Moon for the Misbegotten' at the Arden (2nd review)

In Grace Gonglewski's recent turn as a grieving mother in the Arden's Rabbit Hole, her seamless emotional range transfixed the audience. In Eugene O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten, currently at the Arden, Gonglewski brings the same grounded, split-second nuance to Josie Hogan, an Irish Amazon holding down her conniving father's hardscrabble Connecticut farm in the 1920s.

Gonglewski's Josie, who describes herself as a "big, ugly hulk" of a woman, relishes the irreverent scheming and insults that define the Hogan homestead. As the formidable Josie scrubs handkerchiefs and Dad Hogan gnaws on a raw potato, you can feel the squeeze and splash of set designer Matt Saunders's working water pump. A screen door on the Hogans' peeling shack punctuates the dialogue perfectly with its reedy, wooden smack.

Grappling by moonlight

As the play opens, Josie has filched a few precious dollars to help Mike (a fresh-faced Sean Lally), the last of three Hogan brothers, to escape the father whom only she can tolerate. Plots begin to spin, just in time for James Tyrone, Jr. (Eric Hissom), the Hogans' perpetually soused landlord, to wash in. Hogan attempts to snag Jim and his inheritance in a marriage to Josie.

Gonglewski's Josie finds a feral joy in wielding small weapons, her brassy, outsized presence making men cower under riding crops, sticks and ladles. But the incongruous hilarity of whose pigs are fouling whose ice-pond falls away as Josie grapples in the moonlight with the question of what Jim really wants, and what will happen if they drop their respective masks.

Signs in the lobby

Notwithstanding director Matt Pfeiffer's claim in the program that Moon is a "journey into O'Neill's haunted past," the real theme of this production is the playwright's hunt for our deepest personal truths. None of Moon's main characters are who they seem to be, and we're drawn into their secrets. During the intermission, a woman whispered unbidden in my ear as if she had just landed a choice piece of gossip, "You know she's a virgin, don't you?!"

Signs in the Arden's lobby encourage the audience in this direction by asking personal questions, like: Do you trust yourself? Does alcohol bring out your true self? What is the longest amount of time you have kept up a lie? Audience members are invited to scribble an anonymous answer and drop it into a glass bowl"“ and then peek at others' secrets.

It's a cute idea but hardly a novel one. What confessions do you suppose Jim, Phil and Josie would send today to a popular website known as PostSecret.com? Here, people from all over the world make anonymous postcards of their deepest secrets and post them online for millions to read: corporate whistleblowers, drug-addicted teachers, closet racists, averted or impending suicides. With millions of us baring our innermost secrets and most embarrassing photos on Facebook and its imitators, have our public and private selves ever been as pervasively exposed as in the digital age? ♦


To read another review by Robert Zaller, click here.
To read another review by Jackie Atkins, click here.