The play, O’Neill’s last, was composed
as an attempt to reconcile the
playwright’s relationship with his
brother the failure, Jamie O’Neill, an
actor and a cynical, unregenerate alky.
Nobody liked the play when it came out
in 1947; it was even shut down in
Detroit by a police censor who called it
a “slander on American motherhood.” Some
dirty words were removed and the show
went on, but it was doomed to wallow in
its own lameness anyway, and it died
ignominiously in St. Louis before it
ever made it to New York.

In the ’40s, O’Neill was unpopular;
critics derided his work as ham-fisted,
clunky and teeming with problems. Even
after two highly successful revival
productions in the 1950s of “The Iceman
Cometh” and “Long Day’s Journey into
Night,” critics weren’t convinced that it would be worth
sitting in the dark
for two hours to see “Moon,” and a shoddy production
in 1957 confirmed this suspicion. “Moon”
finally had its day in the sun in 1973,
in a production starring Colleen Dewhurst and the actual
alcoholic (but wholly ingenious) Jason
Robards, and the
critics finally dubbed it a Major Work
of American Theater. But I believe this
was mainly because the ’70s were just as
stupidly self-indulgent, whiny and
gratuitously overwrought as the play is.

The play follows Josie, a gigantic,
strong farm girl, the brash town slut
with a heart o’ gold. Her father is a
crusty old drunk, a loudmouthed,
thieving Irish scalawag with a heart o’
gold. The other guy in the play (Byrne)
is a wealthy fellow and their landlord, a
lying, conniving, bitter Irish drunk
with a heart o’ gold.

Josie is a dismal paean to the nice
girls back home for Eugene O, a
romanticized blot of nostalgia for a
time and place where the women were big,
dumb, sweet and honest in a cow-eyed
kind of way. Josie has a warm breast
for any lonely man to chew on, or at
least that’s what she tells everyone.

In the midst of a rowdy prank on one of
the neighbors, Josie and Jamie (Byrne)
decide to hook up for the night for a
good ol’ shag o’rooney in the shack.
This is all OK with old drunk Dad
because he loudly
wants his daughter to snag Jamie and take
all his money and land, etc., etc.

Josie is game; you can tell she kind of
likes Jamie anyway. After a lot of
rustic hi-jinks and hollering, Jamie
slinks in the moonlight over to Josie’s
shack, Josie wearing her best dress like
a big sad girl trying hard to look
purty, and Jamie begins what is the meat
of the play: a mewling, self-pitying,
pathetic, whisky-dribbling diatribe of
piss-weak moaning that would be tiresome
in any venue, even if the drunk were your
own beloved brother the fuck-up.

First Jamie badgers Josie until she
confesses that she is a virgin, and that
her whole Town Slag routine is a mere
act. This is presumably for obtuse
Catholic reasons that O’Neill surely
related to; I didn’t. Then Jamie yowls
on and on about the death of his dear
old Mama in a way that makes the
tear-jerking Bowery tunes about dead
babies in the 1890s sound like refined
pep songs of the Royal Air Force. Then
it’s intermission.

At the performance I attended, there was
an actual drunk in the audience, one of
those really scary drunks who seems
perfectly sober but is so filled with
malevolent weirdness and fuming with
barely contained paranoia and violence
you know he’s having a grand-mal
blackout.

He was a trendy young asshole, a fat
28-year-old MTV baby with a bad bleach
job who looked like a career fuck-up, a
smart guy who deliberately ruined
himself on a regular basis. He looked
like one of those bookish skateboard
dudes pushing 30 who still works at
Kinko’s and has a real chip on his
shoulder. He was wearing an untucked
T-shirt, trendy sneakers and little
wire-rimmed glasses.

Anyway, at the bar, a fussy little man
timidly approached him and muttered
something along the lines of, “Could you
maybe be a little more quiet during Act
II? You’re really distracting our
enjoyment of the show.”

“Could you maybe eat shit and die?”
loudly announced Drunk Boy.

“I had a feeling you’d say something
like that.”

“Why don’t you go fuck yourself?” Fussy
little man backs up, Drunk Boy lurches
forward and stops. Then there’s another
advance, lurch and stop, the false-start
dance of an aborted tussle. Christ, did
he really mean to beat up this guy in a
crowded lobby at a Broadway theater
intermission?

Drunk Boy had friends in the audience,
who chuckled at him as if he were merely
acting like a slightly more amplified
version of his normal charming self.
Drunk Boy went back to the bar, aglow
with barbarian might. He was friends
with the female bartender.

“What were you doing that made him come
up to you?” she asked.

“Oh, causing trouble. Laughing at the
wrong times. Having too much fun.”

“Here’s your gin and tonic.”

Back in the theater, after a few more
pages of dialogue, the moment is deadly
serious; the whole audience is holding
its breath. Jamie is quietly weeping on
Josie’s lap about his terrible sins, and
Josie the Virgin of Rural Connecticut is
redeeming him, and they’re both having a
Catholic epiphany in the moonlight, and
right when you could hear a pin drop in
the velvety, dark-golden womb of the
theater, there was a choking sound that
came from the back of the orchestra
section.

It was Drunk Boy, violent kid, and he
was laughing, loudly and derisively, a
sputtering, insulting laugh that was
aimed at the stage and the whole
audience. It was truly shocking; a
public unraveling, a person announcing
that he was fucked up to the level of
police intervention. The trance of the
play popped like a balloon.

At that moment (and I’ve felt that
moment before, in audiences, when a
member of the audience explodes)
everyone’s hair stiffened on their necks
because they knew the drunk young
bastard had no social boundaries holding
him together and was capable of
anything. Nobody would have been
surprised if he’d gotten up and started
randomly executing people. People half
expected it, I think, such is the
commonness of morally retarded wackos
with guns.

In any case, the play had a big hole in
it and was sputtering out into space,
and the crazy fucker got dragged into
the lobby and was yelling behind the big,
thick doors. Only super-unflappable pros
like Byrne and Jones could possibly have
kept going at full gallop — lassoed,
captured and swung the attention of the
frazzled audience back to themselves —
and they did. That was quite impressive,
a great save on par with any seen on the
Wide World of Sports.

But back to the play. In retrospect, if
I were a terrible drunk asshole, I might
have started guffawing at that point,
too. After the big moonlight redemption
scene, where Josie’s love heals all of
Jamie’s sins and forgives him on behalf
of his dead mother, Jim wakes up and
it’s a new morning; he feels fresh and
alive. But do they live happily ever
after? Noooooo. Do they even attempt to
pursue health, wealth, happiness and
hope? Nooooooo.

Josie speaks to her father of the “great
miracle” that occurred during the night:
“A virgin who bears a dead child in the
night, and the dawn finds her still a
virgin. If that isn’t a miracle, what
is?” The idea being that Jamie is so
habitually drunk, guilt-ridden,
bitter and set in his rotten ways that
he is already actually dead — totally
unsalvageable — and even Josie’s great,
simple matronly love can’t save him.

This is contrary to the logic of
humanity, contrary to any human heart.
It’s enough to make you want to chew up your
program and spit it at the stage. The
last line of the play is the worst.
Jamie walks away into the sunrise after
they both gush how much they truly love
each other, and Josie stares into the
light and says, “May you have your wish
and die in your sleep soon, Jim. May you
rest forever in forgiveness and peace.”

Die in his fucking sleep? Didn’t she
just spend the whole night resurrecting
him? What is this ridiculous
hopelessness, where a vital young man
walking around under his own power with
a heart full of love is sent off to die
in his goddamned sleep?

Maybe it’s just a thing of the past;
maybe in O’Neill’s day, willfully
unhappy people like old Eugene’s brother
Jamie were tolerated and even
romanticized. Nowadays, a drunk like
that would be peer-pressured into AA,
given intense, excoriating batches of
psychotherapy, tough love and
antidepressants, and not indulged in
the boozy pity patch he keeps crawling
into. He’d be kicked around and nobody
would hang out with him anymore until he
got sober, and he would clean up in a
mildly shamefaced manner, and life would
go on.

Why would we tolerate the end of this
play, if we won’t tolerate the
snickering, drunk MTV bitch having a
meltdown in the back row? Why
romanticize any form of egomaniacal
self-destruction, in any decade?

If we lived in Eugene’s world, we’d be
shooting people for broken legs. O’Neill
tries to portray his brother as somehow
noble for totally giving up and drinking
himself to death, but any
Oprah-watcher knows it’s much more
difficult and heroic to get your shit
together and claim happiness for
yourself, especially when True Love is
aiming both barrels down your throat.

There is no excuse for this play. I say
Eugene O’Neill is a pathetic sot, and “A
Moon for the Misbegotten” should be
interred with the rest of the bad habits
of the early 20th century, like
unnecessary hysterectomies and
segregated drinking fountains. Selah.

Meanwhile, Amy Poehler isn’t the only cast member of “Parks and Recreation” keeping herself in the spotlight. While the comedian is off giving speeches at Harvard, her costar Nick Offerman (who plays her boss and meat-lover Ron Swanson) has been wooing Oprah to come play his first ex-wife next season.  As he told the Huffington Post:

“I think Oprah would be the only, she’s the only person we can think of that might be intimidating to Megan Mullally. It would be so good.”

He then added, “I can assure you if it’s not Oprah, I will quit.”

And while that’s doubtful, Oprah should actually consider it. She did cameo on “30 Rock,” so it’s only fair.

Rounding out the news cycle is Danny Pudi, who plays Abed on “Community.” Anyone who still thinks that show isn’t being taken seriously should check out Variety right now, where “Abed” has been given a column in-character for Emmy season. He’s predicting who will win the awards based solely on his extensive knowledge of television and film (despite never having seen the shows in question), as well as his more savant-like tendencies:

I sort the last four into two groups: a) shows that have won an Emmy, so it seems like they’ll win again, and b) shows that haven’t won yet, so it seems like their turn. Sorting every winner since “I Love Lucy” in 1953:

 B A B B A B A B B AA B B AB B A A B B AA A B A A B B A B B A B AB                              A A B B A A A A B B B B B B A B B A A B

The “ABBA” pattern emerges soon and repeats often, as people’s urge to shake up a system always results in systemic shaking. I totally get it: I once missed a week of school by trying not to touch my chin 7,000 times. The stretches of non-ABBA you see are “cable scares,” like when we just kept giving Emmys to “Frasier” until “Larry Sanders” went away. Think of TV as Rain Man getting through HBO’s smoke alarm by chanting “I like the guy from Cheers.”

The whole article is amazing, and by far my favorite post-finale offering from an NBC comedy actor. Then again, I’m a little biased.

2. Abed from “Community” shows up on “Cougar Town”:

Easter egg for the super fans and the people who love Subway.

3. OWN picks up new series, “Don’t Tell the Bride“: Groom and future wife are separated for a month before the wedding; he has to make all the decisions about planning the event. Hope she likes nachos and a boob-shaped cake.

4. Student makes Chanel bag out of beef jerky:

(Photo by Nancy Wu)

Oh what? It’s all cowhide, no matter which way you look at it. Calm down and take a bite.

5. Museum-going men are happier than their counterparts: That 2 percent of the male population must be having a blast.

6. This mommy kitten is hugging her baby kitten:

Yes, dear, it’s very, very cute. Please let me go back to bed now, I have work in the morning. Well, if it’s so great, take a video of it! I’ll watch it later.

7. “Pop-Up Video” is coming back to VH1: Though now it’s just called “tweeting during music videos.”

8. “Jersey Shore’s” Ronnie and the Situation get into a fistfight in Florence: Really, guys? Really? Italy was ready to boot you out before you even showed up, and this is how you show your good behavior?

9. Mark Zuckerberg, woodsman: The Facebook CEO will only eat food he kills himself. His private message to friends on FB just read: “I just killed a pig and a goat.” And not on FarmVille.

10. “True Blood’s” fourth season trailer: “Oh great, now I have to deal with witches?“

Our thoughts exactly.

No, wait, scratch that. Her show wasn’t truly about Oprah at all. It was about you. All of you. But especially you, the individual sitting there watching her “every day,” as she said.

She had a message for you, the individual. Several messages, actually — and they were all intertwined: Take responsibility for your life. Be honest with yourself and others. Be responsible for the energy you put out in the world, because that energy comes back around eventually. Also: There is a God, or a life force, and you should get to know him/her/it, because he/she/it can improve your judgment and guide your life.

There was a clip reel of people admitting things on TV that they had never told close friends and family members. They said they were alcoholics or drug addicts, that they had HIV, that they had endured or inflicted spousal abuse. The confessions had a snowball effect and became collectively cathartic, Oprah said: “Little by little, we started to release the shame.”

One of the clips was of Oprah herself circa 1986, revealing that she herself had been sexually abused as a child. Another clip referenced the recent broadcast in which actor-director Tyler Perry said he’d been sexually abused as a child, then led an audience of 200 fellow sexual abuse survivors, all men, while they stood together holding pictures of themselves as kids.

Long sections of Oprah’s final syndicated broadcast, which amounted to a 42-minute monologue interspersed with video clips, suggested a church service, though precisely what kind varied from moment to moment.

Sometimes it felt like Sunday school for kids. Other times it felt like a sermon, or the opening remarks of a self-help group leader opening a meeting in a church basement.  “Don’t wait for anybody else to fix you, to save you or complete you,” she said. “‘Jerry Maguire’ was just a movie. [But] no one completes you. We have seen that with guest after guest. When you accept that you are responsible for your life, you…get….free.”

Still other times the broadcast evoked the famous sequence in “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” where Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, presumed dead, attend their own funeral service and hear themselves eulogized. But here was Oprah doing the eulogizing. In an especially unfortunate moment, she suggested that God was responsible for the meeting of her father’s sperm and her mother’s egg. That may very well be true, but if so, it’s true for every other human being as well — and when you put it in the words that Oprah chose, it can’t help but sound oddly messianic.

Oprah’s last words before exiting stage left were, “to God be the glory.”

She talked about how, deep down, she really wanted to be a teacher, and near the end of the broadcast, she introduced her very first mentor, her fourth grade teacher Mrs. Mary Alice Duncan, who was sitting there in the audience, tearing up and grinning.

She said that her guests taught her that there was “no need to feel superior to anybody” because “there is a common thread that runs through all of our pain and all of our suffering, and that is unworthiness, not feeling worthy enough to own the life that you were created for…Your being here, your being alive, makes worthiness your birthright. You alone are enough.”

She said that within each person, no matter what his or her race, creed, color or life experience, is a little voice that asks, “Do you see me? Do you hear me? Does what I say mean anything to you?” That voice, Oprah said, was what she hoped to answer, encourage and embrace over the course of 25 years and 4,561 shows.

It would have been nice if, at some point during the telecast, even a single audience member had been permitted to utter one syllable. There was no dialogue, only monologue interspersed by cheers, laughter and applause. The key to Oprah’s success, she assured us, is that she knows that deep down, everyone wants to be heard. But in this last broadcast, nobody else got a word in edgewise.

It was a final summation in a career which, judged in terms of social good and emotional healing, required no defense. Oprah is a force for good, period. She may inspire love, loathing, bafflement, amusement, irritation, you name it, but there is no possible way to evalute the sum total of her career on TV without concluding that the world is a somewhat better place because she was in it. And yet here she was making a case for herself, Oprah Winfrey for the defense, as if she wasn’t worthy of all this attention and acclaim. As if she didn’t get her own memo. It was poignant in ways she herself probably didn’t intend.

She left her stage, her classroom, her pulpit, unfinished. A work in progress.

So perhaps the biggest surprise of today was a heartfelt speech by Oprah’s silent partner Stedman Graham. Looking nervous, Stedman said that he didn’t know of anyone else who could change so many people’s lives and also bring a bagged lunch to work.

Meanwhile, Dr. Maya Angelou’s contribution to the ceremony was a new poem, which she read accompanied by Alicia Keyes on the piano:

“Unplanned and unrehearsed, this big-eyed black girl from Mississippi, showed the world how to look at itself … She listened to the rich and the poor, the famous and the infamous … For 25 years she listened. … She said, ‘Be strong, be kind, and call me Oprah.’ I can. I will. And I shall. Be Oprah. I am. Oprah. Oprah. Oprah.”

Of course, not everyone took the same approach to honoring the living legend. Jerry Seinfeld used his five minutes to complain about his marriage, women in general, and how it’s Oprah’s fault that ladies mock their husbands. Then Jerry took his seat, directly next to Oprah, because they are best friends anyway.

Simon Cowell introduced a musical number where Rosie O’Donnell sang a reworked version of “Fever,” with special appearances by Dr. Phil, Nate Berkus and Dr. Oz (the last of which said Oprah’s gift to the world was teaching everyone about S-shaped poop). Usher, Kristin Chenoweth and Aretha Franklin filled out the non-ironic singing portion of the show.

The oddest moment of the episode was when Maria Shriver joined Oprah onstage with Gayle King to thank her friend for “giving me  … the most important gift of all … telling me the truth.” It was a loaded moment, though if Arnold was watching, the camera didn’t cut to him. This was Oprah’s day, after all.