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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
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...
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