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Eugene O'Neill's final completed play stands among his most compelling achievements. But its reception was tardy in grasping the true quality of this swan song. Written in the early 1940s, A Moon for the Misbegotten was first produced by the Theatre Guild in 1947 and was a flop; O'Neill himself voiced insecurity about the play before his death in 1953. If only he had experienced Jose Quintero's production in 1973, he would have seen his work vindicated. From the start, Moon is an immense challenge to cast properly and to pace effectively. The smallest miscalculation can shift what should be emotionally wrenching into insufferable sentimentality. This long, lyrical drama offers no place to hide from the searingly intense light it casts on its two central characters. Yet the match here between Colleen Dewhurst and Jason Robards is so ideal that they set the gold standard for the play, which has since become much better known in an increasing number of subsequent revivals. On one level a sequel to Long Day's Journey into Night, Moon continues the former's process of exorcism, but without its turmoil and rage. Instead, the tone--so beautifully calibrated in Quintero's sense of rhythm and musical shaping--is one of elegy, resignation, and compassion. Robards built a career on his uncanny ability to project himself as a soulmate of O'Neill's down-and-out, disillusioned breed of "misbegotten" mortals. He plays alcoholically self-destructive, poetry-quoting older brother Jamie Tyrone (from Journey) with hard-edged honesty. The "giantess" earth-mother Josie is eloquently realized by Colleen Dewhurst in a sturdy and stoical but nuanced portrayal that makes Jamie's confession at the heart of Moon just as much her story and need to experience a "night different from all the rest." Somehow, in the unexpected grace they share, both manage to break free, just for one night, from the patterns they've allowed to predict their behavior. Ed Flanders (who won a Tony with Dewhurst for the revival) brings a magnificent deadpan humor to the Irish tenant farmer father Hogan, concealing his love behind a shared ritual of play-acting with Josie. The DVD is from a made-for-TV production, with the obvious limitations of camera angles and close-ups; it contains no frills (discounting nearly an hour of excerpts from other Broadway Theatre Archive titles), just the pared-down authenticity of O'Neill's characters brought to life with truth-seeking power. --Thomas May
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