DeVita looks for light in 'Moon for the Misbegotten'

Mike Fischer
Special to the Journal Sentinel
Bethany Thomas and Jim DeVita share a gentle moment in "A Moon for the Misbegotten."

She’s described as “so oversize for a woman that she is almost a freak”; she repeatedly calls herself promiscuous but is actually a 28-year-old virgin.

In his 40s and looking older, he’s described as “a dead man walking slow behind his own coffin”; while he can act like a prude about sex, he’s slept with more women than he can count.

This is the show about love that Writers Theatre in Glencoe chose to open on Valentine’s Day?

Eugene O’Neill’s star-crossed romance between Jamie Tyrone (Wisconsin mainstay Jim DeVita) and Josie Hogan (Bethany Thomas) — a dissolute landlord and his farmer-tenant’s daughter — isn’t going to fit on a Hallmark card.

But under William Brown’s direction, this three-plus hour tour of O’Neill’s “A Moon for  the Misbegotten” —  a sequel of sorts to “Long Day’s Journey into Night” and O’Neill’s last play — is indeed a love story.  “Of a fashion,” as Jamie says.

Before the moon rises above these lonely souls on a September night in 1923 Connecticut, there’s an afternoon’s comedy in an hourlong first act – played here as well as I’ve seen it done.  It usually tilts toward farce; in Brown’s sensitive hands, it occasionally resembles Chekhov.

Even as we laugh alongside Jamie, Josie and especially Josie’s father (an excellent A.C. Smith), it’s clear that the personae they project hide a great deal they won’t say, involving the love each of them feels for the other two — and the nagging sense they all have that they’re not worthy.

At the bottom of a long hill he’d already started down in “Long Day’s Journey,” Jamie feels least worthy of all.  Despite a lingering touch of the poet, he’s so far gone in drink and dissipation that he can’t always even muster the requisite energy to hate himself.

And that’s how DeVita plays Jamie for much of the night, true to stage directions indicating that Jamie “talk mechanically” as he “goes along in an automatic way, as if only half-conscious of what he’s doing.”  It’s a deliberately understated performance involving a shriveled husk of a man, already dead even as he goes through the motions of breathing.

Conversely, Thomas — a big woman who towers over DeVita — is an expressionist life force, telegraphing Josie’s struggle between fear and longing.  Loathing her body and angrily sure no man could find her attractive, she helplessly hopes all the same — wondering whether Jamie might find the courage to love her, if he’d but learn to love himself.

It’s that hoping — and Thomas’ aching vulnerability — that I’ll most remember from this “Moon.”  Misbegotten as Josie wrongly believes herself to be, she remains fiercely determined to take back the night and greet the dawn.  Her forgiving moonlight doesn’t just soothe a broken Jamie.  It envelops us all, proving anew that love comes in many forms — and works in mysterious ways.

“A Moon for the Misbegotten” continues through March 18 at Writers Theatre, 325 Tudor Ct., Glencoe, Ill.  For tickets, visit www.writerstheatre.org/.  Read more about this production at TapMilwaukee.com.  

PRODUCTION NOTES

Already Dead: “I didn’t know he’d died already,” Josie says at one point of Jamie, which squares with O’Neill scholar Doris Falk’s claim that Jamie may be the “least dramatic of any of O’Neill’s protagonists.”  Some actors respond by overplaying him as a funny guy (here’s looking at you, Kevin Spacey).  As noted above, Brown and DeVita have instead opted to play Jamie as written: often just going through the motions of living, even though he’s already dead.

That’s not comfortable territory for DeVita, an emotional actor who tends to play big – and not just because so much of his magnificent work during the past quarter century has unfolded on American Players Theatre’s large outdoor stage in Spring Green.  He’s at his best in roles suggesting a boiler about to blow rather than, as here, a furnace that’s long gone cold.  I confess wishing I’d seen a few more embers – including more of Jamie’s self-loathing and disgust – in this dying machine, but credit where it’s due: DeVita and Brown have made strong choices in presenting a Jamie who is this understated. 

And there’s payoff aplenty, above and beyond a character playing true to O’Neill’s text.  DeVita thereby skirts the melodrama that can sometimes swamp this play’s final two (of four) acts; makes more room for Thomas to shine (also true of how this show is blocked and lighted); and gets more bang for his buck from a few key moments – an assault in Act III and a heartbreaking scene with Josie late in Act IV – than he otherwise would.

I should note that I didn’t see DeVita’s performance in this same role at the now-defunct Madison Repertory Theatre 13 years ago; I’d have loved to be able to compare the two.  That history – and DeVita’s performance as a younger Jamie in a 2009 APT production of “Long Day’s Journey,” underscore that he’s thought about who this character is, for a long time. 

One last point, relative to this note: Although written two decades later, “Moon” is set in September 1923.  Two months later, the real Jamie O’Neill (the inspiration for Jamie) was dead.  DeVita surely knows this; his performance clearly suggests it, in channeling a man who tells Josie that no matter where and how often he runs, his own ghost is waiting to greet him when he arrives at his next destination.

Jim DeVita and Bethany Thomas ponder the future in "A Moon for the Misbegotten."

Stayin’ Alive: Milwaukee Repertory Theater patrons will be familiar with Bethany Thomas; this talented Chicago-based actor has appeared in several Rep productions, including “A Christmas Carol” and big-stage musicals “The Color Purple,” “Ragtime,” and “Man of La Mancha.”  She has first-class pipes that won’t quit; I still vividly remember her Serena’s “My Man’s Gone Now” in a landmark 2011 Court Theatre production of “Porgy and Bess.”

Thomas’ grief in “Moon” is acted rather than sung and naturalistic rather than operatic, but it sounds similar depths, as the lovelorn Josie tries to cope with her long loneliness by projecting masks that include angry Amazon, sluttish wanton, and squabbling sibling, all leading toward Josie’s greatest performance of all, as the mother Jamie needs rather than lover she wants to be. Thomas channels all that this great sacrifice costs, while nevertheless refusing to join Jamie by giving up on life or herself. It’s a beautiful and very moving performance.

A Wisconsin Reunion: DeVita and Thomas aren’t the only actors in this cast who’ve logged time in Wisconsin theaters; all five cast members have.  A.C. Smith, a Court Theatre mainstay, appeared at the Rep as Slow Drag in a 2011 production of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.”  Cage Sebastian Pierre (Josie’s brother, Mike) and Eric Parks (a local swell), who have Act I cameos, have both logged time at APT.  Indeed, this production originated in a suggestion to Brown, made at his wedding by APT artistic director Brenda DeVita and Writers artistic director Michael Halberstam, that Brown direct the play.  Both Brown and key members of his design team – including the fabulous Rachel Anne Healy, who is Brown’s go-to costume designer – have worked extensively with APT.

All by way of underscoring what’s apparent to anyone in these parts who cares about theater: Chicagoland and Wisconsin are part of a single artistic ecosystem.  Several prominent Chicago theaters, including Writers, are closer to downtown Milwaukee than Madison – just as Milwaukee theaters are easier to reach for many residents of Illinois’ Lake County than is Chicago’s downtown.  Chicagoans and Chicago-based critics who fail to come north are cheating themselves (and, in the case of critics, their readers).  The same also holds true for Cream City patrons and critics who ignore all that’s happening just a stone’s throw to their south. 

Race Matters: Just as he’d done with his stellar APT production of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” so too, here: Brown makes effective color-conscious casting choices.  In “Moon,” Josie as well as her father and brother are played by black actors, underscoring the asymmetrical power relationship between them as tenants and Jamie as their landlord.  And having Thomas play a Josie who thinks herself ugly highlights the constructed, inherently artificial nature of race and gender (and beauty); think a novel like Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye.”  Black actor Audra McDonald also famously played Josie less than three years ago; in the past few years, I’ve seen excellent and provocative color-conscious casting in APT’s “Death of a Salesman” and a Stratford (Ontario) production of “All My Sons.”  We’re in the midst of an exciting renaissance involving boldly rethought American stage classics; demonstrating their ongoing resilience and relevance through color-conscious casting has been a huge part of that.

Stickin’ it to the Man: As noted above, this play actually begins in comedy, before starting it’s long day’s journey into an even longer night.  The brightest and broadest of that Act I humor unfolds through a standoff pitting Phil and Josie against a nob of a neighbor (Parks), upset that the Hogan pigs are taking dips in his ice pond. Uproariously funny as it is – Smith’s presence alone is enough to ensure it – this scene plays with satisfying truth, here, because it reflects the Hogans’ genuine, populist resentment at a world they never made.  Finding all the layers in O’Neill’s comedy, Brown makes sure that this scene also reflects the Hogan’s insecure sense that they’re not good enough.  The opening night audience rewarded this scene with spontaneous, well-earned applause.