February 11, 2011 | About Last Night

In this morning’s Wall Street Journal I report on a Phildelphia show, the Arden Theatre’s revival of Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten. Here’s an excerpt.
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Six decades after his death, Eugene O’Neill is still widely considered to be America’s greatest playwright–but productions of his major plays are growing fewer and farther between. Only four O’Neill revivals have been mounted on Broadway in the past decade, and major regional productions aren’t much more common. Hence Philadelphia’s Arden Theatre is swimming upstream by performing “A Moon for the Misbegotten,” O’Neill’s last completed play, which I haven’t seen since the 2007 Broadway version that starred Kevin Spacey and Eve Best. I liked it well enough then, but I liked it a lot more in Philadelphia.
Why has O’Neill gone out of fashion? Because his plays are usually long-winded and almost always devoid of poetry. His characters talk and talk (the original production of “Mourning Becomes Electra” ran for six hours) without ever getting around to saying anything memorable. I looked O’Neill up in “The Yale Book of Quotations” the other day and found just five entries, only four of which are from his plays and the most famous of which is remembered because it was the first line that Greta Garbo ever spoke on screen: “Gimme a whiskey–ginger ale on the side. And don’t be stingy, baby.” That’s not what I call quotable, much less poetic.
“A Moon for the Misbegotten” suffers from both of these problems, and by all rights they ought to kill it stone dead. Not only does the play open with an hour and a half of wholly unnecessary exposition, but there’s not a quotable line in it–not even in the second half, which is when O’Neill finally steps on the gas pedal and gets moving. But what started out as a stage-Irish yukfest then turns into a deeply compassionate study of a drunken ex-actor (Eric Hissom) and a poor, unattractive farm girl (Grace Gonglewski) who are too proud to let themselves love one another, and almost before you know it you find yourself caught up in their plight.
Ms. Gonglewski is by all accounts one of Philadelphia’s top actors, and in “A Moon for the Misbegotten” you can see how she got that reputation. Performing in a subtly padded costume that makes her look much more broad-beamed than she is in real life, she plays the part of Josie Hogan with a force and authority worthy of the way that O’Neill describes her character in the play’s stage directions: “She is so oversize for a woman that she is almost a freak…She is more powerful than any but an exceptionally strong man, able to do the manual labor of two ordinary men. But there is no mannish quality about her. She is all woman.” Ms. Best’s performance on Broadway was phenomenal, but Ms. Gonglewski doesn’t have to make any apologies: She comes on like a typhoon….
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Read the whole thing here.

If you’re curious, I explain at the end of today’s Wall Street Journal drama column why we didn’t review Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark this week. Here’s what I wrote:

Contrary to any impression you might have garnered from the reviews that appeared on Tuesday in other publications, “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” is still in public previews, is still being rehearsed and is still undergoing changes, some of which may prove to be significant. The official opening date is Mar. 15. Critics will not be invited to see it until a few days prior to that date, after the show has assumed its final form and has been “frozen” by Julie Taymor, the director and co-author. In keeping with this long-standing professional courtesy, I have not seen “Spider-Man” and won’t do so until the show is officially frozen. My review will run on Mar. 16.

More next month….