Harvesting Moon Trinity stages O’Neill’s classic BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

A badly done premiere production back in 1947 and a dismal follow-up a decade later got Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten dismissed for many years. It was not to be rescued until Jason Robards Jr. and Colleen Dewhurst left Broadway slack-jawed in 1973.

More than with most playwrights of his stature, O’Neill’s work needs first-rate interpreters in order to shine as brilliantly as his once-tarnished reputation now does. Wrenching emotions or wretched emotionalism — his plays can go either way. Even The Iceman Cometh disappointed audiences until José Quintero did it in 1956.

Trinity Repertory Company is staging A Moon for the Misbegotten September 26 through November 9 in their upstairs theater.

The most recent performance of Misbegotten to make a national splash was this summer at Arena Stage, in Washington, D.C. Judging from the reviews, the person who had the most to do with that success was Trinity company member Janice Duclos, for her portrayal of Josie Hogan. Her performance was described as "bighearted, earthy, vulnerable" in the lead of the Washington Post review, and the Washingtonian reviewer enthused that "Janice Duclos is luminous as Josie."

Mighty fine words for a character whom O’Neill, in his hyperactive Roman Catholic guilt over attractions of the flesh, did not want to be a conventionally attractive female romantic lead. His detailed stage directions have her be both "all woman" and "so oversize for a woman that she is almost a freak," physically powerful and intimidating the men around her with what they call her club (it’s a short length of broomstick).

In this semi-autobiographical follow-up to Long Day’s Journey Into Night, the playwright created Jim Tyrone as a stand-in for his alcoholic brother Jamie. Played at Trinity by Fred Sullivan Jr., he is the landlord of Connecticut tenant farmer Phil Logan (William Damkoehler), Josie’s equally dissolute father. Her young brother, Mike (Andy Grotelueschen), escapes the farm in the first minutes of the play and doesn’t return. The only other character is an arrogant neighbor (Stephen Thorne), whom Phil and Josie make short, hilarious work of when he comes in his riding britches with a complaint. But mainly this is the story of Jim’s Madonna/whore complex and Josie’s redeeming him and herself through their mutual, reluctant affection for each other.

Duclos and director Amanda Dehnert spoke about the production recently in the Trinity rehearsal hall.

Q: What’s so hard to accomplish with this play that it’s not staged as often as it should be? Even Arena never produced it before. Is it a particularly tough nut to crack?

Amanda: I wouldn’t call it a problem play . . . It’s about some real basics, about human truths and honesty and communication. And so I think that makes the play seem kind of daunting on the surface, because you can look at the play and say, "What’s really going on here?" There’s a lot of talking. So you have to unwrap the play.

Janice: It’s a fantastic role. I mean, any time you get a chance to be on stage in an O’Neill play practically every minute of the time, it’s a great challenge. What Josie goes through really runs the gamut. Somebody referred to it as the female Hamlet. And I kind of like that. I like thinking I’m doing the female Hamlet. It’s just so exhilarating playing all the different levels — the plots and the schemes and the loves and the betrayals, it’s just got everything in it. It’s a great opportunity for me.

Even now the Robards-Dewhurst production looms large, and there were the inevitable comparisons when we did it — and they did it years ago. If you read the description of the characters, you might think that Josie is almost impossible to cast. "She’s almost a freak" (laughs).

Q: O’Neill gets so specific in his stage directions. Was that a limitation or inspiration in directing, Amanda, and performing it, Janice?

Amanda: For me, I take it with a grain of salt. It is very informative to look at what the creator thinks of the part that they created, but I do not in any way take that as a mandate or a dictum. I find it informative (laughs). Because you can notice certain obsessions, and you can start to figure out, "OK, what he’s really trying to get at is this." And that might not necessarily be what he said.

Janice: His description is quite detailed. I think he goes right down to her eyebrows, doesn’t he? And as far as I’m concerned, she looks just like me. That’s my description of Josie: she looks exactly like me. I think that any woman, no matter how she looks, harbors insecurities about herself. And I think that that’s one of the things women can identify with when they see Josie.

Q: On the other hand, Josie is one of the strongest female characters in American drama. The focus is on James in Act Two, but is there a danger of Josie throwing the play out of balance, if not relegating him to her shadow?

Amanda: I think the danger works in the other direction. I think the danger is that you can read Josie as being there as the figure upon which James is to enact his catharsis or whatever, that she’s there just to serve his arc.

Janice: Josie as therapist.

Amanda: Exactly. Therapist as saint, martyr, redempteress.

Q: So the danger would be to relegate her and not let her potential character emerge.

Amanda: Exactly. For her to be a functionary, haltingly, of James’s redemption. Because O’Neill was writing about his brother and redeeming his brother. And it’s easy to read Josie as superwoman, while she actually has her own problems and flaws as well.

Janice: It’s a love story between two flawed human beings.

Q: Janice, how is your rendition of your character different from the Arena production?

Janice: I knew you were going to ask that. I don’t know. I can honestly say I don’t know.

Amanda: I saw it. It’s a completely bizarre question, because especially when you work on a play like this, the work is about process. It takes its own shape. And the result is not something you can point to as this sort of a finite moment in time. (Turning to Duclos) Performing it in Washington was probably a different experience for you and a constant evolution, and performing it here will be a constant evolution. The play exists only in a moment of time in which it is actually being done. I don’t think I could say, "Oh, I saw Janice’s performance in Washington and I want her to do it differently." That wouldn’t even cross my mind. Or that her performance was great and I want to see that. It’s simply not about that.

Janice: When I agreed to do it, what I had in mind was not to replicate my performance in Washington so that people could see what I had done down there. I wanted it to be a whole new journey. I expected it to be, and it is.