O'Neill's Delicious Restlessness

James Pickering and Kelly Doherty in A MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN with Milwaukee Chamber Theatre

For the most part, it’s just two people talking. It’s not always the SAME two people, but for the most part, A Moon For the Misbegotten is just two people talking. It’s the smallest canvas imaginable, but what playwright Eugene O'Neill did with it is absolutely stunning on so many different levels. This winter, Milwaukee Chamber Theatre explores O’Neill’s romantic drama with fierce intensity that has been deftly delivered to the stage by director Mary MacDonald Kerr. Set around a small shack on the edge of everything, the drama resonates with powerful emotion on the intimate studio theatre stage of the Broadway Theatre Center.

As the drama opens, Josie is aiding her brother Mike to leave the tiny farm ruled over by their alcoholic father. A.J. Magoon has a respectable presence as a man about to head out in the general direction of a coming-of-age drama that O’Neill had no interest in telling. He’s far more interested in those who get left behind as others leave. (That’s kind of the whole focus of the drama.)

Kelly Doherty is deeply engaging as Josie--the daughter of an aging tenant farmer played by Milwaukee theatre veteran James Pickering. O’Neill settles much of the early part of the drama between Josie and her father Phil. Pickering’s grizzled charisma carries his end of the drama with a witty weariness that feels a few shades wiser than Phil would like anyone to know. Doherty and Pickering have an exquisite dynamic. It isn’t easy for a couple of actors to convincingly pretend like they’ve spent the bulk of every day together for the better part of a couple of decades. (The audience is so often doing a lot of work in completing the illusion.) Pickering and Doherty make the audience’s job of completing the illusion of familial familiarity deliciously easy. The two actors have a clever awareness of the rhythms and motions of daily life between a father and daughter who are too emotionally exhausted to do anything but love each other. It may not LOOK like they do, but there’s a real affection that shines through the edges of the frustration and animosity that tangles its way through the early going of the play.

La Shawn Banks is an earthbound specter in the role of Phil’s landlord James Tyrone, Jr.--a well-educated guy who is too busy waiting around for the future to realize that he’s already dead. There’s a dreamy restlessness about Banks as he glides and floats through the ghostlike existence of a man who spends most of his waking hours drunk and most of his sleep in the vacant nightmare of his waking life. Doherty and Banks share an inescapable gravity as Phil bares his soul to Josie in a casually riveting emotional connection between two people on the edge of an ending as the play draws to its crushingly inevitable conclusion.
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​Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s production of A Moon For the Misbegotten runs through Feb. 4 at the Broadway Theatre Center. For more information, visit Milwaukee Chamber Theatre online.
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