The Play of the Misbegotten

The Play of the Misbegotten ROBERT READY O'Neill's dramas often imitate their own existence as theater, as actions people put on for themselves or others. The climactic music and dance of The Moon of the Caribbees, the emperor costume of Brutus Jones, the compelling but awkward masks of The Great God Brown, the infamous production demands of Lazarus Laughed, the Aeschylean presence that hovers around Mourning Becomes Electra, the safety of recovered roles in Harry Hope's bar, the posture and self-parody of Can Melody: O'Neill's audiences and readers experience many forms of theatrical self-consciousness in the plays. The production of meaning in O'Neill can unfold for us in those moments when his theater illuminates itself and OUf awareness of its own representational status. This element of his dramaturgy comes into particularly clear focus in AMoonfor the Misbegotten. "More than any other of his late plays," Timo Tiusanen states, ..this drama ... seems to presuppose a theatre production."\ The last work O'Neill was able to finish, AMoonfor the Misbegollen seems to gather a life's work for the theater into a final synthesis of life with theater. Before Tyrone's entrance in Act One, the dialogue between Josie and Hogan is laced with references to acting, scheming, playing, pretending, bluffing, blathering. Such figures occur in the theatrical register in which father and daughter agree to understand one another. "You did it wonderful," Hogan tells Josie in recalling her childhood manipulation of Tyrone's father: "You should have gone on the stage" (p. 3I5)2 The remark expresses the controlling metaphor of the entire play. The three main characters act out the parts they create in order to know themselves and each other. Such illusive knowledge shares the ground ofessentiaJ personality on which role and reality differentiate themselves. As Josie says of Hogan's own strategem for deaJing with Tyrone's father: "... you've always a trick hidden behind your tricks, so no one can tell at times what you're after" (p. 3I6). In the fourth act, Josie upbraids Hogan for the "scheme behind your scheme" (p. 397), and Hogan defends himself by 82 ROBERT READY saying he'd meant "to bring the two ofyou to stop your damned pretending, and face the truth that you loved each other" (p. 408). Each of these comments opposes exterior to interior or pretense to truth. The play, though, disorients the relationships in such oppositions considerably, until outside becomes the ground for inside, acting the means of significant human action. "Behind" and "after," in one sense, alternate position, as background truth and foreground appearance give up dominant value to each other. What Tyrone himself is "after" has been the central issue for many readers and viewers of A Moonfor the Misbegotten. Josie's interpretation anticipates much of the play and subsequent critical commentary when she says, "!t's the memory of his mother comes back and his grief for her death" (p. 320). If that memory and grief cause Tyrone's misery, then full confession and absolution would seem to be what he is after and what Josie ultimately provides. Or if Tyrone's mourning for his mother is one dramatic process completed in the play, another is Josie's process of mourning for Tyrone, as Stephen A. Black argues.3 PsychobiographicaJ accounts of the play have sought plausible origins ofJames Tyrone, Jr., in O'Neill's brother and in O'Neill himself. Concepts like guilt, confession, and mourning are basic to our readings of A Moon for the Misbegotten. It contributes also to our understanding of the work's power to consider the force exerted on our readings by the pervasive figuring of theater itself in the text of the play. We might call this force the play on the play in the play which leads to our awareness that the moonlight is stage light, not only for audience and reader but for Josie and Tyrone. Judith E. Barlow demonstrates how O'Neill's revisions "play down Jim's past as an actor and his present penchant for theatrics" in order to "eliminate the idea that the actor is simply a poseur faking his anguish...