A MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN
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It must be a sign of an ethnic group’s enfranchisement when undiluted stereotypes can be depicted without eliciting any cry of protest. In Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten, Phil Hogan is an Irish immigrant farmer living in a broken-down shanty in Connecticut who drinks, lies, brags of the tradesmen he’s swindled, and abuses his children. All three of his sons have fled the homestead; the only offspring remaining is his daughter, Josie, a woman of the type sometimes called a “she-male.” Bigger and stronger than a strong man (there seem to be few in the vicinity anyway) and utterly indifferent to any womanly attractions she may have, she declares “I’m a big, rough, ugly cow.” She easily returns her father’s ill-tempered curses and boasts of having slept with most of the men in the county. The owner of the property on which they reside is one James Tyrone Jr., a former actor and present ne’er-do-well who drowns his sorrows in whiskey, women, and florid language.
And florid language O’Neill has in abundance–the Irish being the world champions at garrulity. The blarney falls thick as leaves in this play, the characters talking endlessly about matters well known to all of them, stretching to some two and a half hours a plot that’s little more than this: Hogan fears that Tyrone will sell their farm to the rich English family next door, who are willing to buy him out simply to rid the neighborhood of the Hogan nuisance. Hogan convinces Josie that their only hope is for her to seduce Tyrone into marriage–or into a compromising situation, at the least. This is not as difficult a proposition as it might seem, for Tyrone fancies himself in love with the slatternly Josie. He even declares her to be a virgin and the considerable evidence to the contrary to be mere fabrication–and Josie, for all her defenses, is not entirely immune to this brand of moonshine.
