Love Among the Ruins.(Eugene O'Neill)

When Eugene O'Neill finally finished "A Moon for the Misbegotten," in 1943, at the age of fifty-five, his writing life was almost over. Suffering from the debilitating effects of Parkinson's disease and submerged in gothic-tinged memories of his family's sorrowful past, O'Neill wrote "A Moon for the Misbegotten" two years after completing his masterwork about family drama, "Long Day's Journey Into Night." He was not, in the end, fond of "Moon." In fact, the play seemed to annoy him. Inscribing the published text to his third wife, he wrote, "To darling Carlotta . . . This token of my gratitude . . . a play she dislikes, and which I have come to loathe." It's not clear why O'Neill had less affection for "Moon" than he did for his two other great final works. ("The Iceman Com-eth" was completed in 1939.) Less complicated in its staging than "Iceman" and "Long Day's Journey," "A Moon for the Misbegotten" is the distillation of O'Neill's art: a melancholy howl tempered less by grotesque humor (though the play offers that, too) than by the understanding that love cannot always save a troubled man's soul. Perhaps it was just that "A Moon for the Misbegotten" mirrored too closely O'Neill's own deficiencies in love.

The relatively actionless drama (now in revival at the Brooks Atkinson) is set in an unnamed Connecticut town, and takes place over the course of two days in September, 1923. A faded blue sky hangs above a weather-beaten, ramshackle farm.We see a small, lopsided house and a water pump; no grass grows in the dusty earth. As the play begins, the motherless, Irish-American Josie Hogan (Eve Best) is insisting that her brother, Mike (Eugene O'Hare), wash his face before he runs away from home--there-by escaping their penny-pinching, emotionally withholding father, Phil (Colm Meaney). Josie feels more than justified in slipping Mike some money that she has stolen from the old man. Like her brother, she works on the farm for little pay, let alone encouragement. And, like many unloved children, she tries to compensate for her parents' failures: she does for others what no one has ever done for her.

O'Neill describes Josie as "almost a freak--five feet eleven in her stockings," and weighing "around one hundred and eighty" pounds. He goes on, "She is more powerful than any but an exceptionally strong man. . . . But there is no mannish quality about her. She is all woman." The description brings to mind another lovesick Amazon created in the nineteen-forties: Miss Amelia, in Carson McCullers's short novel "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe." Unfortunately, in casting the slim-hipped and lovely Eve Best in the part, the director, Howard Davies, has sacrificed something that is essential to our understanding of Josie: she is meant to be strong enough to take over her father's farm, if she chooses to. It isn't weakness but goodness--her wish to be a surrogate wife to her father--that keeps her from challenging his authority and control. Best is a fine actress--a tough and vulnerable Olive Oyl, with a wily, sad face that would be perfect for cinema--but she is poorly cast as Josie. She captures some of the femininity of O'Neill's earth mother, but her physical attributes make her a far better match for another of O'Neill's trapped heroines, Anna Christie. (One can imagine her flourishing, too, in Chekhov's plays, as a young woman teetering on the brink of modernity.) Admittedly, my view of Best's deficiencies here may be colored by my having seen how well the late Colleen Dewhurst filled the role, in Jose Quintero's astonishing 1973 Broadway production. It was easy to imagine Dew-hurst, with her full figure, her whiskey-smoky voice, and her thick black hair, digging for potatoes and suckling the needy, all while keeping an eye out for the alcoholic, witty, and broken-down James Tyrone, Jr. (played here by Kevin Spacey).

Jim lives up the road from Josie and her father. He is of a different class--a theatrical artist of sorts, with an excess of time and privilege on his hands. The Tyrones, of course, were the focus of "Long Day's Journey Into Night." (Although we ...