The last work from one of the twentieth century's most significant writers, continuing the semi-autobiographical cycle centring on the Tyrone family started by Long Day's Journey into Night.
James 'Jamie' Tyrone Jnr is a hard-drinking Broadway playboy, trying to blot out his painful memories of the past by indulging his craven self-destructive streak. One day he finds that he has wandered to the home of his salty tenant-farmer Phil Hogan; and Hogan's lusty, jaded daughter Josie.
Under the Connecticut moon, Jamie and Josie find something in each other they never knew existed – though it is only when he passes out dead drunk that Josie can really touch him. But will he still be there when the moon goes?
Eugene O'Neill's play A Moon for the Misbegotten had its world premiere at the Hartman Theatre in Columbus, Ohio, in 1947. It premiered on Broadway in 1957.
This edition of the play includes a full introduction, biographical sketch and chronology.
'Eugene O'Neill is arguably the greatest of American playwrights... this play is a work of shattering genius'
— Independent
'A scorching play about the eternal American theme of reality and illusion... that rarest of theatrical treats: an evening of raw, powerful emotion'
— Guardian
'Tremendous, often shatteringly powerful... wrenches the heart like few other 20th-century dramas'
— Daily Telegraph
'Extraordinary... What this shares with Long Day's Journey, and with all of O'Neill's best work, is the seven or eight layers of contradictory meaning that each line hides, and a cast full of characters who can't tell themselves the truth'
— Time Out
'A tender, tawdry tragedy of missed connections and unconsummated longing'
— The Stage
About the Author :
Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953) was an American dramatist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936. His plays include: Anna Christie (1922), Strange Interlude (1928), Ah! Wilderness (1933), The Iceman Cometh (1946) and Long Day's Journey into Night (produced posthumously 1956).
Review :
'Eugene O'Neill is arguably the greatest of American playwrights... this play is a work of shattering genius'
'A scorching play about the eternal American theme of reality and illusion... that rarest of theatrical treats: an evening of raw, powerful emotion'
'Tremendous, often shatteringly powerful... wrenches the heart like few other 20th-century dramas'
'Extraordinary... What this shares with Long Day's Journey, and with all of O'Neill's best work, is the seven or eight layers of contradictory meaning that each line hides, and a cast full of characters who can’t tell themselves the truth'
'A tender, tawdry tragedy of missed connections and unconsummated longing'
