| |||||
|
Arts & Entertainment Books Comics Health & Body Media Mothers Who Think News  PeoplePolitics2000 Technology - Free Software Project Travel & Food  Columnists - - - - - - - - - - - - Salon People is sponsored by Lexus - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - Also Today For a full list of today's Salon People stories, go to the
People home page. - - - - - - - - - - - - Search Salon - - - - - - - - - - - - Salon Columnists - - - - - - - - - - - - Recently in Salon People Nothing Personal People Feature Nothing Personal Brilliant Careers People Feature - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
Drunk Boy vs. Eugene O'Neill
- - - - - - - - - - - -
March 30, 2000 | It was a fine, respectable production, a
top-shelf cast, everybody did their jobs
just fine, but this play doesn't work at
all. Period. It lacks emotional logic.
O'Neill was either too drunk or too
maudlin or too Catholic or had his head
too far up the collective O'Neill family
ass when he wrote "Moon." There's no
saving this play, even if the cast were
Eleanora Duse, John Belushi and Jesus
Christ himself. No actor, no matter how
magical, can act his/her way out of a
big dead dog. 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. Cintra Wilson Cintra Wilson's column appears every other Thursday in People + Archives
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?
| ||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
||
Next page |