One approach to the future of O’Neill studies is to take a closer look at the past. One place to start would be the original production  of A Moon for the Misbegotten, produced by the Theatre Guild in 1947. Described as “a debacle from start to finish” (Barbara Gelb iii), the production certainly had its share of problems, from casting difficulties to a controversy over censorship. But even taking into account the general preference for self-congratulation over self-criticism, the documents related to the production create a more prismatic rendering, as the producers, actors, director, and critics offer their experience of the events. It would be another twenty-five years before the play would be regarded as great, but the original production was not an outright disaster. A series of circumstances quashed any chance for success, most notably the weight of O’Neill’s reputation, which was an undeniable advantage as well as one of the chief impediments to the production.

Eugene O’Neill had a long history with the Theatre Guild spanning twenty years. O’Neill’s contempt for what he called the Show Shop of Broadway, combined with the Theatre Guild’s reputation for producing the challenging drama that commercial producers usually avoid, made this a logical pairing. Yet, the partnership was not easily realized: the Guild rejected five of O’Neill’s plays, including “Anna Christie,” before agreeing to produce Marco Millions and Strange Interlude during the 1927-28 season. And once the match was made, theirs was a long, and not entirely happy, marriage.

“[Governed] absolutely by a committee” that voted on all aspects of production (Langner 116), the Theatre Guild’s often contentious board of directors seemed to agree on only one thing when choosing a production. During the early decades of the twentieth century, the “great plays” were European or anything other than American. According to Theatre Guild producer Lawrence Langner, “there were no playwrights in America of the stature of Chekhov, Shaw, Galsworthy and Granville Barker, with the sole exception of Eugene O’Neill” (142). Overtures had been made to O’Neill, whose frustration with the Guild was evident in a letter he wrote to Langner, dated 10 January 1921: “the whole thing, to my mind, boils down to this: Either you have faith in my plays, or you haven’t. If you have, you produce them. If not, not. And you have turned down three of mine already. In rejections of my work you have a clear lead over any other management” (qtd. in Langner 231).

Nearly all was forgiven when, during their tenth season, the Guild produced two of O’Neill’s plays, the anti-capitalist Marco Millions and the experimental Strange Interlude. But this was not achieved without a fight. The board was initially cool to the prospect of the lavish production required by Marco Millions and to a nine-act Freudian drama in which a third of the dialogue is spoken as asides. At least one board member said of Strange Interlude that the play would be greatly improved if the asides were taken out (Langner 237). On 21 April 1927, Langner wrote what he describes as a “stinging” letter to the board as part of a campaign to secure the production, saying that “in Strange Interlude we have probably the bravest and most far­reaching dramatic experiment which has been seen in the theatre since the days of Ibsen. [. . .] The play contains in it more deep knowledge of the dark corners of the human mind than anything that has ever been written before. It proclaims O’Neill the great dramatic genius of the age” (234). The hyperbole had the desired effect, and the Guild produced both Marco Millions, which opened in January 1928 to mixed notices, and Strange Interlude, which opened two weeks later to both critical and financial success. With performances that began at 5:30 in the afternoon, interrupted by a dinner break, followed by a second half that continued past 11 p.m., Strange Interlude seemed an unlikely popular success. But the innovative technique of having characters speak their thoughts made Strange Interlude the must­see event of the season and a must-read for those outside the immediate viewing area. The production played sold-out performances for a year and a half, even through the unair-conditioned New York summer. It broke all box office records for the Theatre Guild and was followed by a tour that ran for two years and traveled as far as London. Both the Guild and the author benefited; Strange Interlude proved to be O’Neill’s biggest moneymaker.

This seemed to be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. The Guild produced a number of O’Neill plays in the years that followed, beginning with Dynamo in 1929, Mourning Becomes Electra in 1931, Ah, Wilderness! in 1933, Days Without End in 1934, and The Iceman Cometh in 1946. O’Neill won the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature for many of the works represented on this list; for similar reasons, the years 1928-1939 are considered the vintage years of the Theatre Guild. The twelve-year break between O’Neill plays produced by the Theatre Guild ended with A Moon for the Misbegotten, a play that never made it to New York in its original production.

In the intervening years, the Theatre Guild had its share of successes, including the musicals Oklahoma (1943) and Carousel (1945) but had not been able to maintain its aura as the prestige producer in New York. Feuding on the Board had forced out two of the most vital members, the designer Lee Simonson and the director Philip Moeller. Several times the Guild nearly folded, saved on one occasion by Philip Barry’s Holiday, starring Katharine Hepburn, which also saved her career after having been branded box-office poison. For his part, O’Neill had been absent from Broadway for a full ten years, in part due to a proposed eleven-play cycle, entitled A Tale of Possessors, Self-dispossessed, combined with increasingly ill health and the advent of World War II. O’Neill finished only one of the proposed cycle plays, A Touch of the Poet, with More Stately Mansions surviving as a revised typescript. The drafts of the other cycle plays were destroyed before his death. However, O’Neill did finish several other important plays during this decade, including The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey into Night, and Hughie. A Moon for the Misbegotten was the last play that O’Neill completed, the tremor in his hands making it impossible for him to write.

As O’Neill’s greatest champion on the contentious Board of Directors, Lawrence Langner was eager to renew the professional acquaintance with O’Neill. The author’s third wife, Carlotta Monterey, was less enthusiastic. She, like O’Neill, knew how things stood with the Theatre Guild, and advised her husband not to let the producer read A Moon for the Misbegotten. O’Neill was well aware that the Guild’s desire to renew its reputation would work to his advantage, so he gave Langner a copy of the play to read during the producer’s visit to San Francisco in 1944.

Begun in late October 1941 and completed in 1943, A Moon for the Misbegotten serves in some ways as a continuation of O’Neill’s autobiographical Long Day’s Journey into Night in which the story of the Tyrone family closely follows the pattern of his own. With an aging matinee idol father, a morphine-addicted mother, an alcoholic older brother, and a tubercular younger brother, based on O’Neill himself, Long Day’s Journey offers a harrowing look at the family’s dynamics. In spite of these circumstances, the play presents a forgiving portrait of the parents, though O’Neill felt that his older brother, Jamie, might have been portrayed too harshly. He wrote A Moon for the Misbegotten to rectify this impression. O’Neill stipulated that Long Day’s Journey not be made available until twenty­five years after his death, a wish that was not respected, though the play was not performed during his lifetime. When A Moon for the Misbegotten was first presented in 1947, it was without the preface of Long Day’s Journey.

From the August day in 1912 when Long Day’s Journey is set, A Moon for the Misbegotten jumps forward to 1923. Jamie Tyrone, now known as Jim, has recently buried his beloved mother and is seeking forgiveness for his sins, real and imagined. Jim looks to Josie Hogan, the daughter of a tenant farmer, for comfort and absolution. Aside from his mother, Josie is the only woman whom he has ever loved, in his fashion, and Josie returns his love. Her own romantic intentions must be displaced, however, in order to save Jim from himself. He confesses his deepest secret to Josie, who acts as a mother-substitute and forgives him, sending him off to face the early death he so deeply desires.

In a letter dated 2 February 1942, O’Neill wrote to his son Eugene from Tao House in Danville, California:

Last week I finished the first draft of a new play, A Moon for the Misbegotten. A good title, eh? I wish I could report the first draft lived up to it, but it does not. Much work to do before it will be anything. A case of too much war on the brain. Pearl Harbor exploded when I was starting the most difficult part. After that I dragged through the rest. It is an extremely simple play with only three characters, and almost plotless from the usual dramatic structure standpoint, so it takes a lot of doing. However, I’m enthusiastic about the idea and eventually I hope to make it what it should be. Just now I’m too sunk in spirit, what with war and rainy season blues and physical ailments, to feel up to it. (Selected Letters 526)

When producer Lawrence Langner read the play, he was effusive in his praise, finding it, “one of the greatest plays O’Neill has ever written, and one of the truly great tragedies written in our time.”

The play has, in its final act, and at the end of the second act, the spiritual uplift which is the characteristic quality of all great tragedy, and along with it is such a profound knowledge of the good and evil in humanity as to raise it head and shoulders above “Anna Christie,” which it resembles to some extent in its father-daughter and lover relationship. Indeed, the maturity which ’Gene had reached as a dramatist can well be measured by contrasting these two magnificent plays; the first, “Anna Christie” with its partly happy ending (and I am not averse to happy endings), and A Moon for the Misbegotten with its ruthless tragic finality. (402)

Langner secured this play for the Theatre Guild as well as the opportunity to produce The Iceman Cometh, though O’Neill preferred to wait a year or two on the latter production, feeling that the play’s relentless pessimism would clash with the country’s post-war optimism and result in a poor reception. It was determined that Moon would open the Guild’s 1946-47 season, and that the O’Neills would move East for the opening.

After a second reading, the producer began to realize some of the play’s inherent difficulties. As he stated in his autobiography, The Magic Lantern, published in 1951, “the leading woman was to be a veritable giantess—indeed, exactly the kind of woman who, when she comes to see you and asks to advise her whether she should attempt a career in the theatre—you look embarrassed and reply, ‘Well, I’m afraid you’re a rather big girl—how are we to find a man tall enough to play opposite you?’” (Langner 402). Langner continues, “In addition to the physical requirements of the actress, she must be tremendously experienced in the theatre and must have exactly the kind of emotional acting experience that would be difficult for a girl of her size to obtain” (403). O’Neill’s description of Josie Hogan is memorable: “so oversize for a woman that she is almost a freak—five feet seven in her stockings and weighs about one hundred and eighty.” With the ubiquitous map of Ireland stamped on her face, Josie is “more powerful than any but an exceptionally strong man [. . .]. But there is no mannish quality about her. She is all woman” (Moon 857). To Mary Welch, the actress who would play her, she was described by the casting officials at the Theatre Guild as “a great earth-mother symbol, and the actress who plays her should have a range from farce to Greek comedy” (Welch 81). At her audition, O’Neill told the actress: “Although the setting is New England, the dry wit, the mercurial changes of mood, and the mystic quality of the three main characters are so definitely Irish” (Welch 82).

With these descriptions to work with, the casting of Josie posed a formidable problem. The Theatre Guild searched New York, Hollywood, Dublin, and London for an actress to fill the physical and emotional dimensions of the role. A relatively unknown Broadway actress, Mary Welch was the leading candidate, though the playwright was concerned about her somewhat limited acting experience, her “too normal” size, and, most importantly, her degree of Irishness. With parents born in County Cork, Welch passed that part of the audition, and appeared at subsequent readings pounds heavier from a diet of potatoes, bananas, and pies. At the time, a provision known as the “potato clause” was in vogue in Hollywood, stipulating that an actress could not gain weight or substantially alter her appearance. When Welch was finally cast in the role, she signed a contract with a different kind of potato clause, which read, “The artist agrees to gain the necessary weight required for the role.” According to the actress, O’Neill’s main concern was not her size but that “Miss Welch understands how Josie feels” (Welch 82). This is surprising, given O’Neill’s usual insistence that the stage directions be taken literally. Subsequent Josies, from Colleen Dewhurst to Kate Nelligan, from Salome Jens to Cherry Jones, have emphasized the emotional amplitude of the character over a misplaced preoccupation with size.

The Theatre Guild attempted to interest a long list of directors in the project, initially contacting Dudley Digges, a Guild regular, about directing the production. John Huston was also approached. Over twenty years before, at age 18, Huston sat in on all the rehearsals of O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms, which was a great success for his father, the character actor Walter Huston, who played the role of the patriarch Cabot. In his autobiography, The Open Door, Huston described the lasting effect of this experience: “What I learned there during those weeks of rehearsal would serve me for the rest of my life. Not that I was aware of it at the time. I only knew that I was fascinated” (35). Even before reading the play, Huston responded with an immediate yes. Film commitments at Warner Brothers prevented him from taking on the assignment, a genuine disappointment for Huston, who apologized in person to the playwright and described how meaningful the experience of Desire Under the Elms had been for him. Josh Logan was also offered the chance to direct, but he telegrammed his regrets on 26 November 1946, saying that it was a “tough job for a director” (Theatre Guild Collection). Rouben Mamoulian was approached; better known as a director of films, he had enjoyed successes in several of the Theatre Guild’s musical offerings, including Porgy and Bess, Oklahoma, and Carousel, as well as the O’Neill drama Marco Millions. In a memo to Mamoulian from Associate Producer Armina Marshall Langner, dated 4 December 1946, with copies sent to Mr. and Mrs. O’Neill, the director was told to consider it “only as a production which would have [the] utmost simplicity and Mr. O’Neill’s directions followed to the letter: that there is no opportunities [sic] for a director’s ‘holiday’ since his job is really to get performances from the actors” (Theatre Guild Collection). The offer was retracted after O’Neill insisted on an Irish director—Mamoulian was an Armenian trained in Moscow—but it is difficult to imagine a director known for lavish productions meshing with the character­driven tale of a pig farmer’s daughter. Only after the cast was set did the Guild secure the services of director Arthur Shields. Shields was the brother of actor Barry Fitzgerald, the Guild’s first choice for the role of Josie’s father, Phil Hogan. A veteran of the Abbey Theatre, Shields was in keeping with the all-Irish imperative that O’Neill had established for the principal players.

If the search for a director and an “overlarge Irish damsel with the acting abilities of a Duse” (Langner 404) was not challenge enough, the casting of the male roles provided its own set of difficulties. Barry Fitzgerald was unavailable due to a lucrative radio contract, and the actor James Dunn, discussed as a possibility for Jim Tyrone, initially had film commitments. Dunn was a song-and-dance man who was signed by Fox Films in 1931, and appeared with Shirley Temple in her first three films. By the late thirties, musicals were out of fashion, and this, combined with Dunn’s alcoholism, made him virtually unemployable. Dunn is best known for his film appearance as the alcoholic father in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1945; he was cast in the role of Tyrone based on this performance. As the “name” player in the production, Dunn received a run-of the-play contract and $1,000 per week, compared to the standard contract and $350-a-week salary of Mary Welch. The Irish actor James M. (or J.M.) Kerrigan was cast as Phil Hogan at $750 a week. There was a small flurry of publicity surrounding the casting of Welch’s understudy in the role of Josie. A tall blonde actress named Maria Minton, better known as Maria Riva, was cast. She is perhaps best known as the daughter of Marlene Dietrich.

With O’Neill in attendance, the first table reading in New York went reasonably well until the third act when the tragedy of the play began to overwhelm the cast. According to Langner:

Dunn began to cry. “I’m sorry,” he said. “This is just too much for me.” “Take a rest,” said Arthur Shields, the director, in his rich Irish voice. “No,” replied Dunn. “I’ll go right ahead.” He continued to read, but was so overcome by tears that he could not continue. We all decided to take a rest. After a while Mary Welch began to cry and had to stop reading, by which time everybody sitting around the table had tears in their eyes. Said Dunn, “We’re all crying now. I guess it will be the management’s time to cry later.” (407)

Langner ends the anecdote with “How right he was” (407).

From the first reading, O’Neill was not happy with the play in rehearsal, but rather than cancel the production—with scenery built and contracts signed—the Theatre Guild proposed a tryout in several midwestern cities before the Broadway opening. O’Neill reluctantly agreed, and provided a list of preferred cities in which the play could appear. According to biographer Louis Sheaffer, “Where the Guild was doubtful of Miss Welch, the playwright was chiefly dissatisfied with Dunn and complained to Langner that the actor was not making Jamie Tyrone enough of a gentleman. Langner, unaware [at the time] that the character was based on O’Neill’s brother, felt that the playwright held an ‘idealized’ image of the character” (594). O’Neill was too ill to attend all but a few of the rehearsals; Mary Welch describes him at their first meeting as “more bone than flesh” (82). The playwright advised the actors not to forsake the comedy of the first two acts and to wait until the third act to play the tragedy.

While producer Lawrence Langner might have been unaware that the character Jim Tyrone was based on O’Neill’s brother, actor James Dunn was unaware of almost all things O’Neill. Dunn had never seen an O’Neill play, and as he told Louis Sheaffer, “I didn’t really like the play; I like to do comedy, I love to hear people laugh, but my wife, she told me I ought to do it—Eugene O’Neill, the Theatre Guild, a big prestige thing” (594). Dunn was not sure that the Guild understood him, and he definitely found the Guild’s treatment of O’Neill baffling: “The Guild built a wall around him. [. . .] They made an idol out of him. Someone would come dashing into the Guild and say, ‘He’s just turned in from Fifth Avenue.’ A little later, someone announcing, ‘O’Neill is coming up the stairs.’ One day I got down on my knees and as he walked in, salaamed, ‘God O’Neill.’ He liked it, I could tell from his face, but the Guild didn’t know how to take me” (qtd. in Sheaffer, “Notes/Dunn” 1).

Due to O’Neill’s ill health, the dress rehearsal was performed in New York rather than Columbus, Ohio, the first stop on the tour. The unusual step of a New York dress rehearsal added $5,000 to the budget, adding an additional 10% to the entire production cost. After the rehearsal, the playwright reassured Mary Welch, telling her, “I know you will play Josie the way I want” (qtd. in Welch 83).

Attended by the Governor of Ohio and his daughter as well as the fashionable Mrs. James Dunn, wreathed in “a halo of roses and a black satin dress” according to Time Magazine, the opening at the Hartman Theatre on 20 February 1947 was the social event of the season and the biggest cultural event that Columbus had seen since before the war. The O’Neills were not in attendance, but the critics were out in force. Samuel T. Wilson, the premier critic in Columbus, wrote in the Dispatch:

Developments of narrative, establishment of motivation, [and] definition of character are in the deliberate, painstaking O’Neill tradition. However long [and] drawn-out some of this may have seemed on opening night, the fact remains that none of it is functionally extraneous, nor is the old-time melodramatic plotting and counter-plotting heard in the first and second acts with deliberate, nicely calculated design. The muted beauty and the tremendous emotional impact of the climactic third act would lack much of its effectiveness against any other background. (14A)

Wilson found Dunn to be “admirably cast” but monotonous in his long speech in the third act; Mary Welch had “all the basic elements the long and taxing role of Josie requires, the stature, the voice, the intelligence, the spiritual awareness. Her comedy playing is, at present, insecure and a bit forced. The emotional side of her performance she has essentially in her grasp” (14A).

Critic Elliot Norton, who traveled from Boston, described the play as “profoundly beautiful,” writing, “This is O’Neill at his peak, the O’Neill who has always been fascinated with the idea of stricken human beings who ‘belong’ to each other. [. . .] It is simple romantic tragedy in prose that touches the hem of poetry, written from the heart to move the heart” (Theatre Guild Collection). Norton found the actors nervous in the early scenes but “far more convincing” (Sheaffer, “Notes/Reviews” 1) as the play progressed. He wrote of Mary Welch, whose name he got wrong: “Mary Ward, a hitherto unknown actress who must be close to six feet tall, plays the girl in a performance that is not yet perfected. In the early scenes she lacks the hard, sharp tongue, the vigor and quick authority of a girl who could curb or even hit a hard father. In the later scenes, which are far better lighted, she is pictorially and otherwise far more convincing” (Theatre Guild Collection). Writing in the Boston Post, on 21 February 1947, he added, “[The play] is not likely to get to Boston” (qtd. in Sheaffer 595). (The same objection to Welch’s performance, that she was not rough and tough enough, had been raised by the producers at the Theatre Guild in the rehearsal notes. In fact, supervising producer Theresa Helburn, after executing all the contracts, questioned the choice of Welch in the role, asking Langner in a memo: “Is this really what we want?” [Theatre Guild Collection].)

At the second stop on the tour, during the week of 24 February 1947, William F. McDermott, who also saw the play in Columbus, wrote in the Cleveland Plain Dealer that the play was “still rough in spots” but also “a harsh, powerful play [. . .] [containing] some of the best and most touching writing of the greatest American playwright” (qtd. in Time 47). McDermott also wrote, “the words were not only too numerous but not always chosen with O’Neill’s habitual taste and discretion. In striving for frankness and realism he sometimes seemed to achieve mere sensationalism. The play deals with Irish characters, or characters with a strong strain of Irish in them, and the Irish are not dirty talkers. I feel sure that what O’Neill had in mind is not completely realized by the performance of this play” (qtd. in Sheaffer, “Notes/ Reviews” 1-2). This objection to the characters as “dirty talkers” would come to haunt the production; apparently, an Irish American writing of Irish Americans should present his characters as models of decorum rather than recognizable human beings. The anonymous reviewer from Variety noted that while the play “still needs more tightening and better tempo, [. . .] none could deny the strange beauty of the ‘Moon’ mood of disillusionment, nor the heart-hitting fervor of the emotional clashes created by the three lead characters as they futilely try to buy their lost dreams” (qtd. in Time 48).

At Pittsburgh’s Nixon Theatre, the production, which opened on 3 March 1947, was treated to a censorious reaction by both critics and civic leaders. William F. McFall, president of the local chamber of commerce, “admitted he hadn’t seen the play [. . .] [but] received an unbiased report on it from reputable business leaders, and was shocked at what they reported” (“Detroit” 7). Mrs. Florence Parry, writing in her column “I Dare Say” in the Pittsburgh Press, was equally scandalized “at this evidence of deterioration in a playwright who for over 20 years has maintained an indisputable place as the greatest dramatist of our time” (qtd. in “Detroit” 7). Apparently, the good people of Pittsburgh were not the only ones offended by O’Neill’s play. J. M. Kerrigan, who had been well received by the critics in his role as Phil Hogan, chose to leave the production after Pittsburgh, with actor Rhys Williams brought in to complete the run.

There was trouble brewing before Pittsburgh, however. According to the production notes, on the sixth day of rehearsal, Kerrigan walked out. Later, when the cast was interviewed by local papers before the production opened in Columbus, Kerrigan was nowhere to been seen. James Dunn, acting as a sort of master of ceremonies for the event, assured the press that Kerrigan was off enjoying the great art museums of Columbus. Kerrigan’s contract called for two weeks notice if he planned to leave the cast. If this clause were invoked, he gave his notice almost immediately after leaving New York. According to Variety, in typical Varietyspeak, Kerrigan “has disliked role of boozy, profane Irish farmer from Connecticut, right along, having been skeptical from moment it was offered him, but feeling he might be able to do something with it. Those close to the situation say veteran actor chiefly resented light in which O’Neill had placed the Irish, and furthermore, he’s supposed to have told friend, Kerrigan couldn’t stomach the profanities he had to mouth, claiming he’d never before cussed on the stage” (“‘Moon’ Found Anti-Irish” 7). The alleged profanities, mostly variations on the word “damn,” would be considered mild to a contemporary audience.

But nothing could have prepared the company for the reception in Detroit, where the censor was ready and waiting for them. Expected to open at the Cass Theatre on 10 March 1947, the production was welcomed with a red banner headline in the local Times that morning, saying, “O’NEILL PLAY CLOSED FOR OBSCENITY.” Police censor Charles Snyder found the play to be “a slander on American motherhood” (Sheaffer 595) and insisted that the play be rewritten before the show could go on. Producers Theresa Helburn and Armina Marshall Langner were in Detroit supervising the engagement, and they met with Snyder to go over his objections. According to Marshall, “One of the objections [Snyder] made was that the word ‘mother’ appeared in the same sentence with the word ‘prostitute’” (qtd. in Langner 408). Additionally, Snyder wanted certain words to be changed: “louse” for “bastard,” “tart for “whore” and the elimination of a reference to a girl as “pig” (Sheaffer 596). Helburn and Marshall were horrified by the prospect of a policeman editing the writing of Eugene O’Neill. Surprisingly, the savvy producers at the Theatre Guild had failed to anticipate the reaction of the midwestern audiences to the rougher language of the play. The producers were shocked that Snyder did not stand in awe of O’Neill. The Theatre Guild’s reverential attitude was lost on the police censor, who was unimpressed by the news that O’Neill had won the Nobel Prize, saying to Marshall, “Lady, I don’t care what kind of prize he’s won, he can’t put on a dirty show in my town” (qtd. in Langner 408). The Theatre Guild’s tendency to deify the author was superseded by the more immediate need to pacify the censor.

Actor James Dunn had seen the announcement in the morning paper and arrived to see if he could help to quell the controversy. Dunn happened to be friendly with Michigan’s assistant secretary of state, whom he contacted. Using his friend’s name, Dunn met with the censor, who refused to work with the two women and edited the script with Dunn. Depending upon the version of events, the censor cut eight to thirteen words. For publicity purposes, the Theatre Guild tried to make light of the situation, saying that Mr. O’Neill had been contacted in New York, and that “the changes were so slight that Mr. O’Neill just laughed about the matter and agreed completely” (qtd. in Sheaffer 596).

Director Arthur Shields saw the situation differently. In a transcribed interview, Shields told Louis Sheaffer: “I had been told that O’Neill wouldn’t tolerate any cutting so that it was a great surprise to me when during the last days of rehearsal he asked me if I thought the play should be cut. Truthfully I was floored by the question. My 25 years at the Abbey Theatre—which was definitely a playwright’s theatre—had taught me not to tamper with the work of an established author. It just wasn’t done. I truthfully told him that I hadn’t thought of it and hoped that no drastic alterations would be made” (“Notes/ Arthur Shields” 2). James Dunn and Mary Welch both mention that O’Neill was not averse to making cuts when requested by the actors; according to Welch, “it came about when he realized that we were obviously upset at having just too much to say” (83). Dunn had difficulty remembering lines, and when he wanted to change some lines to make them easier for him to say, O’Neill “didn’t make any fuss, just said, ‘I don’t care what change you make but don’t change the meter.’ [Dunn] assured him that he was safe on that” (Sheaffer, “Notes/Dunn” 1).

But the controversy in Detroit was another matter entirely. Shields maintained that more than thirteen words were cut, saying, “I’d expected the Guild to fight that kind of censorship and was surprised when word came that the police officer would be allowed to dictate what could be said. I got the impression that when O’Neill was contacted on the phone by the Guild, he was so fed up that he told them to do what they liked. The whole episode was so distasteful to me that the following morning I left for the Coast” (Sheaffer 596). O’Neill was no stranger to this kind of controversy; his play Strange Interlude was banned in Boston, allegedly because of a veiled reference to abortion. Producer Langner had a slightly different version of the Boston banning of Strange Interlude, stating that the real objection came not from the Catholic Church nor from angry Irish Americans, but from certain local political bosses: “We were given a message that the matter could be settled by paying the sum of $10,000 as a legal fee” (Langner 238-39). Instead, the Theatre Guild moved the production to the Wollaston section of Quincy, Massachusetts, and ran buses to the Boston suburb, where the play was an enormous success. (Thanks to the dinner break necessitated by the length of the play, a struggling restaurant near the theater was able to survive: the restaurant was a little place called Howard Johnson’s.) In any case, being banned in Boston or anywhere else was a badge of honor for O’Neill. That the production of A Moon for the Misbegotten capitulated so quickly indicates how much things had changed in O’Neill’s professional life and in the Theatre Guild’s management.

Despite the controversy and the departure of two key members of the production, the play received its strongest reviews in Detroit. Russell McLaughlin, in the Detroit News, described O’Neill as “an Irish poet, for all his unassailed position as America’s first dramatist. His present characters, although they use some of the worst modern language ever heard on a stage, are actually dark, eerie, Celtic symbol-folk [. . .] who beat their breasts at the agony of living, battle titanically and drink like Nordic gods, but finally are seen to wear the garb of sainthood and die for love” (qtd. in Sheaffer 596). As McLaughlin continues, “the effect of it all is, frankly, tremendous” (Sheaffer, “Notes/Reviews” 3). Harvey Taylor, in the Detroit Times, praised all three of the principals, Williams, Welch, and Dunn, adding, “It’s one facet of O’Neill’s genius to strip not only his characters but his audience of all protection. A Moon for the Misbegotten will make many people feel uncomfortable and vulnerable. [. . .] There is profanity, crudeness, and drunkenness in the play, but they are there only because they have to be to lend credence to O’Neill characters and his theme” (Sheaffer, “Notes/ Reviews” 3).

The police censor objected to speeches that are among the most powerful in the play. The first two acts feature a melodramatic plot. Phil Hogan, supposedly fearful that he and Josie will lose the farm, maneuvers to save his home through a ruse that will bring his daughter and Tyrone together. Hogan plans to discover the couple in a compromising position, and then force them to marry, knowing that the misbegotten pairing is, in truth, a love match.

Jim, on the other hand, is looking for someone in whom to confide his darkest secret, and it is not until the third act that we learn what that is. After his father’s death, Jim began to look after his mother and stopped drinking in the process. On a trip to California, she died suddenly from a brain tumor. Unable to face the prospect of losing her, Jim starts to drink heavily. On the train ride east, with his mother’s coffin in the baggage compartment, he meets a prostitute whom he describes as “a blonde pig who looked more like a whore than twenty-five whores, with a face like an overgrown doll’s and a come-on smile as cold as a polar bear’s feet” (Moon 931). Every night, for fifty bucks a night, he visited the prostitute “with some mad idea she could make [him] forget—what was in the baggage car ahead” (931).

Josie is horrified by the tale but forgives him his trespasses. Separate from her father’s scheme, Josie loves Jim and had dreamed of a romantic evening with him. Instead, she spends this moonlit night cradling Jim in her arms, allowing him to “[cry] his heart’s repentance against her breast” (933). Josie admits that she “has all kinds of love for [him]—and maybe this is the greatest of all—because it costs so much” (927). As his surrogate mother, Josie forgives him as his mother might have. At the end of the play, Jim Tyrone is at peace with himself, though “at peace as a death mask is at peace” (927), according to the stage directions. When he leaves, Josie knows they will never see each other again. By setting the play in September 1923, O’Neill places the events two months before the death of his real-life brother and a year after the death of his mother.

There are autobiographical underpinnings to the story about the prostitute on the train; supposedly, a similar incident occurred when Jamie O’Neill accompanied his mother’s coffin back from the coast. In a related incident, Saxe Commins, who began as O’Neill’s dentist, then became his chief typist, and finally editor-in-chief at Random House, describes the evening of 9 March 1922, when The Hairy Ape opened in New York at the Provincetown Playhouse. Commins accompanied the second Mrs. O’Neill, Agnes Boulton, to the opening. O’Neill rarely attended opening nights, but on this evening he was completely unavailable. In a speech written for an event called “Pipe Night at the Players,” delivered at the Players Club on 10 November 1957, Commins describes how The Hairy Ape ended with no fewer than a dozen curtain calls for the members of the cast as well as repeated cries for the author: “Agnes and I sat quietly and sadly through the demonstration, all too aware of the pathetic errand Gene was on at that very moment when the applause and the clamor for his appearance were at their height. He had gone to the Grand Central Station to claim the coffin which contained his mother’s body, shipped from California, under the care of his older brother, Jim.” As Commins continues:

The coffin was to be taken, under Jim’s direction, from the New York Central baggage car and transferred to a New Haven train for shipment to New London, where burial was to take place. When the train arrived in New York Jim was in a state of catalepsy. He had drowned his grief in whiskey. Gene’s efforts to rouse him failed and he had to abandon him and wander by himself through the catacombs of the Grand Central Station in search of the misplaced body of his mother.

After groping for almost an hour through the underground mazes he finally came upon the casket and had it placed in the baggage car of the New London train. Then he returned to Jim’s berth and shook him to consciousness. One way or another he got Jim and his bags to the hotel, where he promptly passed out on Gene’s bed. (Saxe Commins Collection)

Commins wrote out the speech in longhand on several sheets of yellow paper, dated 10 November 1954, while he was undergoing tests in the Princeton Hospital. He instructed his typist, identified as Mary Q, “the only one who can read his writing,” to make four copies for him. The handwritten version has only one word crossed out, so it seems that Commins was certain of what he was writing and completed it with no hesitation. The typed and finished version presented to members of the Players Club is unchanged, as Commins tells the tale of a dramatic and heart-wrenching night in the life of Eugene O’Neill.

If only it were true. In fact, when Commins and Agnes Boulton returned to the hotel that evening, O’Neill was reticent about what had transpired. He was supposed to meet the train accompanied by one of his parents’ oldest friends, William P. Connor, but when the time came, his nerve failed him (Sheaffer 85). O’Neill was at a loss in a crisis, having begged off traveling to California when his mother first suffered a stroke, using the excuse of his own ill health. Although O’Neill’s telegram to his brother claimed he would suffer a “complete nervous collapse” if he undertook the trip, he was in reasonably good health at the time (Sheaffer 82). Instead, O’Neill sent his brother the name of a specialist to contact in Los Angeles if his mother’s condition improved enough to seek further treatment, a physician recommended by his own psychoanalyst, who had diagnosed the author’s imminent collapse. Connor, meanwhile, had insisted that O’Neill fulfill his duty and accompany him to the train station, but O’Neill stubbornly refused. Accompanied by his nephew, Frank W. Wilder, Connor found the coffin without difficulty and had it removed to the luggage wagon. He then retrieved the drunken Jamie from his compartment, got him into a taxi, and deposited him in a hotel off Times Square. Disgusted, Connor called O’Neill and filled him in on what had occurred at the station (Sheaffer 86).

Whether the content of Commins’s speech is a work of fiction by O’Neill or by Commins is uncertain; however, everyone seems to agree on what happened next. When O’Neill appeared in the lobby, he asked his friend to take a walk with him in Central Park. They walked from midnight until four in the morning. O’Neill had little interest in what had happened at the theater that evening. According to Commins:

There followed a tormented recital of his mother’s struggle against addiction. Gene’s speech poured out of him as if at confessional. The Hairy Ape was forgotten. It was not as if it had been played for the first time that night but belonged in another life. His mother now was the central figure of the tragedy. The world most certainly was not hers [an echo of ‘The world is mine!’ curtain line from The Count of Monte Cristo, the melodrama that made a fortune for his father and destroyed him as an actor]. Compassionate as he was toward his mother, so bitter was his denunciation of his brother, Jim. Yet even in his fierce criticism there was a trace of admiration and envy. Jim, in Gene’s eyes, was the gifted one, but the one who had committed the great sin against the Holy Ghost; he had wasted his talent, thrown it mockingly away. (Saxe Commins Collection)

The conversation with Commins later became the material for both Long Day’s Journey into Night and A Moon for the Misbegotten.

The original production of A Moon for the Misbegotten continued to persevere, but despite positive reviews, the Theatre Guild chose to close the play after two weeks in Detroit and a final week in St. Louis. Critic Myles Standish, of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, was well aware of the drama unfolding offstage, acknowledging that “many decisions as to its ultimate form on Broadway hinge on the way it and the cast shape up here this week.” Standish generally liked the play, calling it “a fine play and a moving one, a play that is rough, harsh, almost crude on the surface, but underneath the veneer has tenderness, compassion and a keen psychological insight. In spite of the crudity of some of its language and situations, and the seemingly moral degradation of its characters, ‘Moon’ is really a highly moral play. The aspirations of the protagonists are toward decency.” Standish added that the softening of the dialogue from the original script was not due to the censorship encountered in Detroit; rather, “it was chiefly because some outspoken language had previously caused ill-timed laughter that jangled the serious later mood of the play” (Sheaffer, “Notes/Reviews” 2).

The Guild had never been entirely satisfied with the casting of the principals, an opinion shared for different reasons by the director Arthur Shields, who was hired after the cast was set: usually, the director is instrumental in making these choices. Five-and-a-half weeks on the road had done little to change the Guild’s opinion. As Lawrence Langner and Theresa Helburn explained in a form letter prepared for investors, “On its own merits, we have always felt that the play is one of genuine quality and importance, and we are gratified that our belief in its basic values is shared by many of the dramatic critics who have seen the performances, [but] recognizing the unusually difficult problems of casting inherent in the play—the burden of the action falling upon the three major characters [. . .] the show has been withdrawn for re-casting” (Hammerman Collection). In a memo dated 27 March 1947, sent to H. William Fitelson, who served as counsel to the Theatre Guild, Langner stated, “We are closing Moon at the request of Mr. O’Neill, who does not want the play brought into town with the present cast. You will appreciate, of course, that all the members of the cast were okayed by Mr. O’Neill and that under the Dramatist’s Guild contract, we had a perfect right to bring the play in” (Theatre Guild Collection).

The plan was to recast and reopen the play during the following season. But O’Neill’s health was uncertain as was his interest in the production. In an inscription to a published copy of the play, dated 22 July 1952, O’Neill dedicates it to his “darling Carlotta” on the occasion of the couple’s twenty­third wedding anniversary, writing that it is “a play she dislikes and which I have come to loathe” (rpt. in O’Neill, Selected Letters 589). His wife objected to the scene in which Jim describes sleeping with the “blonde pig” on the train, but O’Neill refused to change it in order to make the play more acceptable to his wife or to a wider audience (Sheaffer 660-61). O’Neill successfully put off further discussions of A Moon for the Misbegotten, stating in the prefatory note to the published text, dated April 1952, that “since I cannot presently give it the attention required for appropriate presentation, I have decided to make it available in book form” (rpt. in O’Neill, Moon 854). A Moon for the Misbegotten was not produced in New York until 1957, four years after O’Neill’s death.

For its part, the Theatre Guild continued in the attempt to attract actors and directors, contacting Elia Kazan in January 1949. Kazan was interested in directing and thought Marlon Brando would be excellent in the play, although further discussions were left until after the opening of Death of a Salesman on February 1. This casting never materialized, nor did Rosalind Russell, who was suggested for the role of Josie in 1947. British actress Wendy Hiller was also offered the part in December 1947, but didn’t think herself “American enough” to do it. She must have changed her mind; ten years later, she starred as Josie in the first Broadway production. The Guild’s 1946 production of The Iceman Cometh was the last O’Neill play on Broadway during his lifetime.

For about a decade after the initial productions of The Iceman Cometh and A Moon for the Misbegotten, it became fashionable to bash O’Neill and to find his plays long-winded and out of date. This changed in the mid-1950s with a revival of Iceman, directed by José Quintero, with Jason Robards as Hickey. The next fall, Quintero directed a production of Long Day’s Journey into Night, which set in motion a long period of renewal for O’Neill’s work. The Broadway premier of A Moon for the Misbegotten in 1957 and an Off­Broadway revival in 1968 began to salvage the reputation of the play. In 1957, although New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson felt that “no stage production can solve the problems [of the play] (21), Clive Barnes, writing in the same publication in 1968, called the play a “minor-masterpiece,” adding that it “may well come to be regarded as the proof of [O’Neill’s] genius.” According to O’Neill biographers Arthur and Barbara Gelb, O’Neill himself felt “mortally wounded” by the Theatre Guild’s “flawed” production of his final play: “Only another writer of O’Neill’s stature could have understood the severity of the blow. Experiencing a similar period of rejection, Tennessee Williams told an interviewer in 1981: ‘I’m very conscious of my decline in popularity, but I don’t permit it to stop me because I have the example of so many playwrights before me. I know the dreadful notices Ibsen got. And O’Neill—he had to die to make Moon successful’” (12).

This may not have been a requirement, but it was not until twenty years after O’Neill’s death that the play received its due. The original production was reviewed through the prism of O’Neill’s reputation: O’Neill’s name was the main reason that the Theatre Guild had taken on the play in the first place. The production was diminished, if not doomed, by the fact that it was sent out of town for previews, and the cast never had the full confidence of the Theatre Guild. As a result, the troubled production was in no shape to measure up to O’Neill’s previous successes. As Mary McCarthy wrote in her review of the play in book form, “‘Casting difficulties’ were spoken of, which is generally a theatrical euphemism for loss of interest in a property” (209).

An additional complication was the play itself. What appears to be a melodrama evolves over the course of four acts into what Michael Manheim describes as a transcendence of that form: “The play’s interest moves from that associated with melodramatic intrigue to that associated with the total release of pent-up feeling—to a catharsis not unlike that associated with classical tragedy” (155). O’Neill had encouraged the actors not to sacrifice the comedy of the first two acts for the tragedy that followed; audiences too were challenged, and, in some cases, confused, by the transposition of the genres. Social attitudes also assisted in the demise of the production; the play’s discussion of drunkenness and promiscuity, not to mention the alleged obscenity, shocked the citizens of the midwestern cities in which the play toured. But O’Neill had been teaching audiences to curse for over twenty years. No stranger to the seamier side of life, he often brought them along for the ride, and was likelier to take audiences to a bar for down and outers, as in The Iceman Cometh, than to the comforting hearth and home of Ah, Wilderness! Although it is easier simply to blame the actors, who, admittedly, were not the dream team assembled for the landmark production of A Moon for the Misbegotten in 1973, it was a combination of circumstances that led to the demise of the original production.

The original production died on the road, but the play was resurrected there in 1973 in a production directed by José Quintero. In fact, Quintero named this enterprise the Resurrection Company, referring not only to the play but also to the careers of those involved. It did just that for Quintero’s career as well as those of Jason Robards and Colleen Dewhurst. The play at last achieved greatness in a legendary production described as brilliant in its acting and direction. In addition, the shifting of social mores over twenty­five years made the language and behavior, condemned as obscene in 1947, more to be pitied than censored. Jim’s tale of his journey homeward with his mother’s coffin is still a searing indictment, but of Jim’s character, not of American motherhood. The censors were not called in when the play debuted at the Academy Theater in Lake Forest, Illinois, outside of Chicago.

In the summer of 1973, the Resurrection Company was put together, or, more precisely, put back together. Colleen Dewhurst had first been directed by Quintero in the 1958 production of Children of Darkness at Circle in the Square, and had twice played Josie Hogan in productions directed by Quintero: in Spoleto, Italy, in 1958, and in Buffalo in 1965. In 1968, director Ted Mann had wanted Dewhurst to play Josie at the Circle-in-the-Square revival of the play, but she would not do it without Quintero. Twice married to the actor George C. Scott, Dewhurst had recently divorced him for the second time, was unengaged professionally, and broke. José Quintero had taken his own mystical connection to O’Neill so far as to become an alcoholic, and had gone through a period when he was unable to work. Jason Robards, who had been directed by Quintero in The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey in 1956, had recently survived a car crash. After learning that he would not repeat his stage triumph as Hickey in the film version of The Iceman Cometh—Lee Marvin was cast in the role—Robards took a ride down the Pacific Coast Highway which almost killed him and came close to disfiguring his face permanently, thus ending his career. Rehearsals for the production were held in Los Angeles to accommodate his schedule of surgeries: Robards had broken every bone in his face and needed to have his upper lip reattached. Lake Forest Theater producer Marshall Migatz had engaged the company for a three-week run as part of the summer season, although the play is far from the usual light summer fare. The day before rehearsals were to start, Migatz himself was killed in an automobile accident. Out of respect for the producer, the theater’s board of directors decided that the show would go on. Added to this tight group was the actor Ed Flanders, ten years younger than Dewhurst, to play her father. Luckily, Flanders fit in immediately, for Dewhurst, Robards, and Quintero often rehearsed with a whispered shorthand that had evolved over decades of working together.

When the show opened in Lake Forest, it was an immediate success, and Quintero was certain that “we will all be together in New York in the fall” (qtd. in McDonough 176). In fact, the production had no immediate future. Dan Isaac, of the Village Voice, made the journey to Lake Forest and wrote a positive review, which is acknowledged as one reason the production made the move to Broadway. Quintero, Robards, and Dewhurst tried to finance a production themselves, but the rights had been purchased by producer Elliot Martin as a vehicle for Jack Lemmon. When Lemmon decided against the project, Martin could not raise the capital and yielded controlling interest to producer Lester Osterman, who wanted it to play his then-dark Morosco Theater for five weeks, to be followed by a tour. Certain that investors would not be interested, Osterman put up the money himself (McDonough 177).

By late fall 1973, the company was in New York, rehearsing for eight days, beginning the Friday after Thanksgiving. Following a three-week stint prior to Christmas at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, where the reviews were positive but not overwhelming, the production moved to New York, opening on 29 December 1973, after five sold-out preview performances. Although the producers had not arranged for an opening-night party—Robards and Dewhurst hosted their own gathering—there was plenty of reason to celebrate. The raves cascaded in, recognizing the work of all the major players. Brendan Gill, in the New Yorker, stated that “Colleen Dewhurst gives the performance of her life as Josie; in my mind the part is hers forever” (58). T.E. Kalem, in Time Magazine, wrote, “[Jason Robards’s] performance will remain a touchstone for all actors to measure themselves by. Similarly, Colleen Dewhurst is ideally cast. No woman has been big enough for the part before, not only physically but in that generosity of heart, mind, and spirit which Josie must convey” (42). Albert Bermel in the New Leader, said that “Ed Flanders [. . .] creates a characterization that would have made O’Neill weep with pleasure” (28). In the Nation, Harold Clurman, with whom Dewhurst had studied acting in the early stages of her career, described the play as “the best production of the best play of the season” (92). Clurman’s review is memorable for his short tirade on the failure of the original production, blaming its author and producers. Alluding to O’Neill’s description of Josie Hogan, “almost a freak—five foot eleven in her stockings and weighs about one hundred eighty,” and the infamous clause that required actress Mary Welch to gain the necessary weight for the role, Clurman went on to say, “This stupid and horrible clause may very well have led to the actress’s death shortly after the play’s production” (92).

Tragically, Mary Welch did die in 1958 at the age of 35. The cause of death was an internal hemorrhage that occurred during the late stages of her second pregnancy. In the ensuing years, Welch had played Stella in the national tour of A Streetcar Named Desire in 1948-49 and originated the role of Missy LeHand in the Broadway production of Sunrise at Campobello in 1958. While a significant, if temporary, weight gain is not beneficial to one’s health, it is unlikely that this played a role in her untimely death over ten years after A Moon for the Misbegotten. And the attachment to the stage directions originated with the author and not the producers at the Theatre Guild. The “author-worshipping” tendencies that enabled O’Neill to demand a literal translation of his words belonged to the Theatre Guild, however, “where all O’Neill’s faults were presented to the public with careful reverence” (333), as Eric Bentley wrote of the Theatre Guild’s The Iceman Cometh, which ran concurrently with the original A Moon for the Misbegotten.

While most critics were generating superlatives for the 1973 production, not all were in agreement. Martin Gottfried, writing in Women’s Wear Daily, objected to the “shameless use of the past reputations of its director and actors, rather than their present talent” in a “manufactured attempt to imitate that past” (17). Though praising the performances of Dewhurst and Flanders, Gottfried found that under Quintero’s “listless” direction, “Robards goes through the motions of the thousands of times he has played the same role in various O’Neill plays” (17). This opinion was very much in the minority, however; most agreed with Julius Novick in the Village Voice: there will “probably never be a better production of A Moon for the Misbegotten than the one José Quintero has directed at the Morosco” (67). After 313 performances, the play closed on 17 November 1974, and was later filmed as a television play and broadcast on ABC-TV on 27 May 1975.

Comparisons are inevitable, and, in this instance, invariable. Revivals of the play mounted on Broadway in 1984 and in 2000, as well as in numerous regional and college theaters, have been reviewed in the context of the 1973 production, which is regarded as definitive. The myth has grown to the point where it frames all productions before or since. The 1947 production has perhaps suffered the most by the comparison; rather than disappear into the mists of memories, its reputation seems to have gotten worse. Without relying too much on the kindness of out-of-town critics, the original production of A Moon for the Misbegotten was not entirely without merit, though it was only an intimation of what the play could and would become. The problems with the original production resulted from circumstances not entirely of its own making, and its speedy dismissal as a poorly acted or directed project ignores the larger and more complicated issues that compelled its closing.