'Moon for the Misbegotten' at Walnut Street Theatre

The first act is a comedy of sorts: The characters manipulate each other to get what they want, be it sex, love, money, or ownership of the land they live on. The second act is an angst- and alcohol-laden ramble through the O’Neill landscape of love lost, never to be found again.

In O’Neill’s world, liquor is the balm that makes a man forget his failures and his failings. The play begins with Josie sending her brother Mike (Jamison Foreman) away from a future that doesn’t exist, just as she sent off two other brothers before him. She is left to contend with her father, Phil Hogan, played masterfully by Michael P. Toner, who seems always one drink away from oblivion, and their landlord James Tyrone Jr. (Anthony Lawton), who would woo her if he could just stay sober long enough to do so.

There’s no happy ending here, just a brandy-soaked night beneath the moon for two lovers who will never come together.

Impossible schemes and personal mythology

The performances are compelling, and the set, a ramshackle farmhouse in Connecticut in 1923, conveys the challenges of survival — a working pump, a bucket for washing. Michael Toner, who returns to the stage after an accident last June that cost him his leg, seems made for the role of the crotchety, conniving father. His limp and cane are so much a part of the character that, though O’Neill didn’t write him that way, there is no reason why he couldn’t have done so. Toner’s spot-on depiction of a man who only knows how to lie his way into what he wants transcends the disability and lets us focus on what impossible scheme he will come up with next.

Smith’s depiction of Josie, the daughter who has created her own mythology, develops as the play goes along, even if she starts out a little too well-groomed for a woman who is busy doing her laundry with a washboard. Once the minx mixes in with the anger, she comes alive. Lawton, playing the role O’Neill based on his older brother, is at his best when keeping a lid on his passions: As a drunk who can’t tell fact from fiction once he sobers up, he’s sometimes a bit too remote from the action going on around him.

Uncertain tone

The play itself seems unsure of what it is trying to be. Is it a comedy or a tragedy? Burdened by a bit too much repetition — how many times must a character repeat the same line? — it sometimes drags when it should compel. One of the most absorbing moments is Lawton’s delivery of a monologue about his character’s deepest guilty secret, but in the middle of it I was longing for an editor to come along and shorten the speech.

Drawing on his own background, O’Neill creates characters who are profoundly affected by addiction. Set in 1923, 12 years before Alcoholics Anonymous was established, the play shows how alcohol is the essential social lubricant even in rural Connecticut. In this play, it is the teetotaling daughter who holds the farm and her father together while pretending to be a tart herself. This cliché of the good daughter who gives up her own happiness to save her family is only now starting to change, so perhaps O’Neill stands as a reminder of how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go.