Kathy you are so lucky.For those of us out here in the hinterlands it is so frustrating. That is why we want him to get back to making films so we get a chance to see him.

Can you think of some way we can get a copy of the reviews ?Those newpaper articles had names but no city or addresses. I would love to see the reviews. Keep in touch Kathy.

Found this article in the Princeton Packet News.  Hope you all enjoy.

Journey's End

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O'Neill took a plot so familiar it sounds like a joke -- Broadway dandy meets farmer's daughter -- and transformed it into a meditation on disappointment.

Jim Tyrone (Andrew McCarthy), awash in self-loathing, medicates his existential "heebie-jeebies" with whiskey and whores. Earth mother Josie (Kathleen McNenny), a big, proud, rough woman, defends herself against loneliness with manufactured gossip that she is the town slut. Her cunning, brutal father, Phil Hogan (Jack Willis), who has driven his three sons away from their hardscrabble farm, masks his tenderness for his daughter with tough talk.

In a plot full of scheming -- for love, for money, for revenge -- there is always "a trick behind the trick"; we think we're in on the plans, only to be surprised by yet another ploy. What starts as farce shades into tragedy; powerful revelations and heart-wrenching last chances fill a moonlit second-act duet.

The three characters, filled with complex self-contradictions, require actors who can convey their wounded humanity with subtlety and charm. Phil Hogan, often treated as a minor character, is major here, and Willis is a shrewd, apelike and violent Phil; the actor can play a man play-acting so convincingly that we're never quite sure what we're watching.

Jim tells Josie they "belong to the same club. We can kid the world, but we can't fool ourselves." And so they kid us, until we see through the bluff. Seeing into the truth of things is not only the plot and the structure of the play, it describes the experience of watching it. And this requires acting within acting.

McNenny amply fills the part of Josie, one of American dramatic literature's great female roles, despite her modest size. She is both lovely and plain, managing to show us the crucial girlish sweetness under the defensive swagger and grubbiness.

McCarthy crafts a Jim Tyrone who is, at first, so light on his feet he seems to dance while his fingers flicker in nervous, graceful gestures. Then his flair crumbles to ashes and despair.

Visually, the production is flawed. The puzzling set is especially surprising, since the McCarter is known for spectacular set designs. But the Hogan shanty is inappropriately huge, with little to suggest poverty or the ramshackle quality of their lives. Inexplicably, people sometimes walk through the invisible front wall, sometimes go around and use the door. The immense upstage wall is unreadable: Is it bleached-out tree bark? A gigantic wrinkled sheet?

And, in a play about moonlight, the lighting seems understated and untheatrical. Strict naturalism undermines the passion, and for O'Neill, passion is always the point.
 
Sets, Eugene Lee; costumes, Jess Goldstein; lighting, Jane Cox; sound, Andre Pluess, Ben Sussman; fight director, J. Steven White; production stage manager, Cheryl Mintz. Opened Jan. 20, 2006; reviewed Jan. 21; runs through Feb. 19, 2006. Running time: 2 HOURS, 40 MIN.
 

Posted on Tue, Jan. 24, 2006

From the early, short plays like The Emperor Jones to the late, long plays like A Long Day's Journey Into Night, Eugene O'Neill's great subject is regret - the might-have-been, the if-only, the too-late. In A Moon for the Misbegotten, his last play, the yearning and the remorse are intense, and McCarter Theatre's production of this American classic is deeply moving.

The hardscrabble farmer, Phil Hogan, and his big, voluptuous daughter, Josie, make a formidable pair: Both of them are tough, proud and audacious. She is known as the town slut, and her father is a slave-driving drunk whose three sons have run away from the mean life on their farm. We enjoy the Hogan blarney and mischief, their attack on Harder, their snobbish, rich neighbor, and we are touched by their rough love for each other.

Jim Tyrone, a Broadway dandy in spats and pinky ring, is their landlord and Phil's drinking pal. This is the same Jamie Tyrone we know from Long Day's Journey - a drunk and a squanderer with a taste for whores. Years of dissipation, his parents' deaths, and an incurable self-loathing have turned him into "a dead man walking slow behind his own coffin," as Josie says pityingly. It becomes clear that Jim and Josie love each other profoundly, although it takes them most of the play to be able to acknowledge that.

Phil Hogan always has "a trick behind the trick," and we watch layers of scheming pile up; we think we're in on the plans, only to be surprised by yet another layer and another ploy. What starts as farce shades into tragedy as the powerful revelations and heart-wrenching last chances create a second act duet of pathos and need.

The three characters, filled with complex self-contradictions, require three actors who can convey their wounded humanity with subtlety and charm.

Josie is one of the great female dramatic roles, and Kathleen McNenny is wonderfully earthy, managing to show us the crucial girlish sweetness under the defensive swagger and grubbiness. Jack Willis is a shrewd, apelike and violent Phil - an actor who can play a man playacting so convincingly that we're never quite sure what we're watching. Andrew McCarthy crafts a Jim Tyrone who is, at first, so light on his feet he seems to dance while his fingers flicker in nervous, graceful gestures, and then we watch this flair crumble to ashes and despair.

The only flawed aspect of the production is the set, and this is especially surprising since the McCarter is known for spectacular set designs. But the Hogan shanty is inappropriately huge, with very little to suggest poverty or the ramshackle quality of their lives. And sometimes people walk through the invisible front wall and sometimes they go around and use the door. Inexplicably, Josie can see the clock on the kitchen wall from the front yard. The immense upstage wall is unreadable; what are we looking at for nearly three hours - bleached-out tree bark? A gigantic wrinkled sheet?

Gary Griffin, who directed the current Broadway production of The Color Purple, directs this long, exposition-filled play with admirable naturalness and speed; O'Neill's dialogue is often clunky on the page, but here the delivery is human and intimate, and Griffin has found a way to let the play escape from the prison of "classic" back into living drama.

A Moon for the Misbegotten

Written by Eugene O'Neill, directed by Gary Griffin, sets by Eugene Lee, costumes by Jess Goldstein, lighting by Jane Cox, sound by André Pluess and Ben Sussman, fight direction by J. Steven White. Produced by McCarter Theatre Company.

The cast: Andrew McCarthy (Jim Tyrone), Kathleen McNenny (Josie Hogan), Jack Willis (Phil Hogan), Peter Scanavino (Mike Hogan), Jeremiah Wiggins (T. Stedman Harder).

Playing at: McCarter Theatre Center, Berlind Theatre, 91 University Place, Princeton, through Feb. 19.

Tickets: $28-$48.

Information: 609-258-2787 or www.mccarter.org.

To begin with, there's a house.

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Because most of the action in Eugene O' Neill's "A Moon for the Misbegotten" takes place in the front yard of Hogan place, in most productions, all we usually see is the front porch.

But for the new show now on stage at the McCarter Theater Center's Berlind Theatre, award-winning set designer Eugene Lee has built the entire house. Cozy if a little rundown, the fully furnished rooms in the front fade away into a half constructed silhouette of bare beams — a tangible symbol of unfinished dreams.

Lee also has taken the front yard playing area and thrust it right out into the reconfigured first rows of seats, bringing the action closer to the audience. Add to this Jane Cox's lighting, so lush and burnished you can almost see the actual moonlight, and you have a play that's more intimate, accessible and inviting.

The same can be said for this "Moon" overall, although not everyone will appreciate making O'Neill warmer and a little fuzzier. The director, Gary Griffin, also was responsible for an essentialist, boutique version of "My Fair Lady" at McCarter a few seasons ago. Clearly, Griffin likes to think a little outside the box — and he's confident enough as a director to make it work, even if the risk-taking isn't a resounding success.

"Moon for the Misbegotten," which many consider a kind of epilogue to "Long Day's Journey Into Night," is a difficult play to watch and present. If it's done right, the emotions are so raw and the characters, when they drop their facades, are left so vulnerable, that it's almost too painful to witness.

Although there are five characters in all, only three really matter and casting them is a feat in itself. There's Mike Hogan, the Irish tenant farmer who's not quite the garrulous, uncaring drunk he pretends to be. He hides his needy attachment for his adult daughter, Josie, behind rough jokes and insults. Worse, he sends her out to seduce the landlord in order to save the farm, knowing full well what it will cost her emotionally. In a recent Broadway version, Hogan was played as a rascally leprechaun by Roy Dotrice. Here, however, Peter Scanavino gives us a big, blustery but quite fragile man, a portrayal reminiscent of Brian Dennehy's approach to James Tyrone Sr. in the 2003 Broadway production of "Long Day's Journey Into Night."

The landlord, of course, is James Tyrone Jr., modeled on O'Neill's real life brother, James, a self-loathing alcoholic who was confined to a sanitarium at the time "Moon" was written. Critics have judged this play O'Neill's benediction for his tragic, unlikable brother, and really, it's hard to see it as anything else. Andrew McCarthy, late of the Brat Pack movies, doesn't quite have the matinee-idol charisma we might expect for this role. But looking like a thin, pale wraith in spats, he does communicate the sense that James is really a walking dead man revived for only a few hours before he's consigned to his fate.

The character responsible for that revival is Josie Hogan, played by Kathleen McNenny. Part whore, part virgin, part earth-mother, Josie is O'Neill's fantasy of a perfect woman. She is also, as O'Neill himself admitted, impossible to cast.

Colleen Dewhurst, when she appeared opposite Jason Robards, came closest as no one has since. McNenny is no exception. She's really not right for the part. She's tall all right, but not even close to the homely, large breasted woman — the "ugly cow" — envisioned by O'Neill, and no amount of mussed hair or mud on her feet will change that.

Nevertheless, she has a lovely, heartfelt rapport with McCarthy, as well as tremendously long legs and large, expressive hands to pet, embrace and ultimately cradle him with.

Similarly, this production draws us in and cradles us as well. That may not please O'Neill purists, but it is, as Josie is for the failing Tyrone, good enough.

JASON TOWLEN Gannett News Service
Andrew McCarthy takes a break on stage at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, where he is starring in the theater's production of "A Moon for the Misbegotten.'

IF YOU GO
"A Moon for the Misbegotten' will be performed through Feb. 19 at McCarter Theatre Center, 91 University Place, Princeton. Tickets are $28 to $48. Call (609) 258-2787 or visit www.mccarter.org

Actors often speak about keeping a mental list of roles they yearn to play.

Andrew McCarthy's pet roles are rooted in the hallmark works of 20th-century American theater such as Tom Wingfield in Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie, James Tyrone Jr. in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night and in O'Neill's final work, the semi-autobiographical A Moon for the Misbegotten.

McCarthy checks off Tyrone from his list when he stars this month in A Moon for the Misbegotten at Princeton's McCarter Theatre Center. Gary Griffin (Broadway's The Color Purple) directs.

"There are several plays I've wanted to do in my life . . . and this is one of them," says McCarthy, 43, who grew up in Westfield, Union County, and went on to become a member of Hollywood's Brat Pack in the 1980s, starring in such films as St. Elmo's Fire, Pretty in Pink and Weekend at Bernie's. Doing O'Neill and Williams is "sort of climbing a mountain for an actor, good mountains to have climbed. They change you as actors."

O'Neill's tragic Moon focuses on washed-up New York actor and braggart Jamie Tyrone, loosely based on O'Neill's brother. Tyrone, an alcoholic haunted by his mother's death, is the non-resident landlord of a farmhouse occupied by Josie Hogan (Kathleen McNenny) and her Irish-immigrant father, Phil (Jack Willis). The play, which originally ran on Broadway in 1957, four years after the author's death, takes place over the course of one boozy night as Josie and Jamie open up to each other.

"Doing O'Neill demands different things . . . a certain willingness to give it up that is very uncomfortable and unpleasant at times," McCarthy says.

He's revisiting the role of Jamie Tyrone after playing him in Long Day's Journey into Night in 1999. "But if the play's going to happen, people have to just do that. You're dealing with these sort of epic, big Greek emotions about love and hate and life and all these dreary topics."

But McCarthy seems more interested in exploring "dreary topics" than in dusting off memories about the old days on the set with Demi Moore and Molly Ringwald.

"I don't have much nostalgia for my past," he says. "Those movies . . . all that Brat Pack stuff, I mean, those were some good movies. I was glad to be part of them. It captured something for a generation . . . but I'm just sort of here now."

McCarthy has been all over the stage, in Broadway's Sideman and in off-Broadway productions of The Exonerated and Fat Pig. McCarthy recently made his directorial and writing debut with News for the Church, a short film based on a Frank O'Connor short story about a woman who confesses her sexual activity to a priest. In the fall, he appeared in several episodes of the Benjamin Bratt-Dennis Hopper TV series E-Ring.

He also is a seasoned traveler, though you probably won't find him holed up in a mammoth American chain hotel in Paris, wolfing down le Big Mac.

"I always came back a better person whenever I traveled," McCarthy says. "I came back having more empathy for people, because when you're alone and in a strange place and you speak nothing and don't know anyone, don't know where you're going to sleep, it's getting dark and you need people to help you, it's nice to put yourself in that position, because it brings out the best in one. We're always trying to find comfort and I think one of the reasons to travel is to step away from comfort."

Perhaps that's what O'Neill is about for McCarthy, what a thorny character such as Tyrone offers him: an opportunity to step outside of the comfort zone, a reason to empathize with a difficult personality.

"I don't think he's unlikable at all," McCarthy says of Jamie. "I think (he's) heroic in the sense of his relentless search to expose himself so he can be absolved in a certain way and I think that's a heroic journey, even though he has done some despicable things. When all is done, can we still be decent people and have done horrific things we're still ashamed of? That's his question: He's trying to figure out if he can, having done what he perceives to be these horrible things, still be a redeemable person."

These are epic questions, questions about faith and fate and demons, questions most of us -- including Tyrone -- might not face without a bottle of whiskey in one hand.

But McCarthy seems up to the task.

"It's all so open and raw and exposed," McCarthy says of the rehearsal process for Moon. "At a certain point, you're all on a life raft together . . . .

"This (role) came up. It's something I've wanted to do," he continues. "I was surprised it came up when it did. I said . . . "OK, am I ready for that? Well, ready or not, let's give it a try.' "

Reach Laurie Granieri at (732) 565-7333 or e-mail granieri@thnt.com