A Moon for the Misbegotten has been sponsored by:
Eugene O’Neill’s
A Moon for the Misbegotten
“There is no present or future,
only the past, happening over and over again, now.”
”A Moon for the Misbegotten is a play about finding peace—not the peace at the bottom of a whiskey bottle found by Harry Hope and company, but peace rooted in human kinship of the closest kind. It is a play about forgiveness and self-forgiveness. And it is a play about the close of life, though no one dies in it and there is no violence whatsoever in its conclusion. It feels like an autumnal play, a play which looks toward death without fear or bitterness. It may be more than happenstance that O’Neill set The Iceman Cometh in July, Long Day’s Journey in August, and A Moon for the Misbegotten in September. The first two are far more full of anguish and the torrid heat of summer, the last of “mellow fruitfulness.” That O'Neill was in a Keatsian mood when he wrote the play is suggested by quotations from that poet in it; and they are quotations which emphasize death as a natural, inevitable process. Nothing could be further from the tone of this play than the panic associated with Parritt’s suicide. This play is tragedy concluding in a tone of reconciliation and lyrical sadness.”
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