cause of his deep anger; as he does so, her humiliation is compounded with a similar anger and sense of betrayal. She does not want to believe that Tyrone would break his promise to them about the farm, but she is already suffering one broken promise. At Hogan’s prompting, therefore, she agrees to take part in the scheme to lure Tyrone into her bed. Once again, Tyrone arrives unexpectedly; Hogan pretends to be drunk and staggers back to town, and the act ends with Josie getting whiskey from the house and Tyrone waiting on the steps outside.

Act 3 begins where the preceding act ended; Josie comes back outside with a bottle of whiskey. Initially, she attempts to affect the brazen demeanor of a hussy, but Tyrone tells her that he is tired of whores and wants her to be herself. Despite his urge to prove that she is a virgin, he says, he wants this night to be different from those he has spent with tarts. Telling her that she is the only woman he loves, he adds that she is beautiful because she is kind, wholesome, and strong. Josie struggles against her desire to be close to Tyrone, until he informs her that he fooled Hogan into thinking he was going to sell the farm. Upon learning that Tyrone intends to keep his promise to Hogan, Josie drops her defenses, tells Tyrone she loves him, and admits to being a virgin—one who, nevertheless, wants to go to bed with him. He would ruin their relationship, he says, like he ruined the one with his mother. Indeed, the guilt he feels for having failed his mother, as well as his need for forgiveness, has compelled him to seek maternal solace from Josie. The third act ends as they sit on the bedroom steps, Tyrone asleep in her arms.

Act 4 opens at dawn the following morning; Josie is awake and still holding the unconscious Tyrone, and Hogan is peering around the corner of the house at them. She acknowledges his presence, tells him that she believes he knew Tyrone was kidding about selling the farm, and vows to leave him for his duplicity. Hogan is apologetic, but Josie orders him into the house until after Tyrone has awakened. Tyrone soon wakes, expresses gratitude and affection to her, and says good-bye. As she watches Tyrone disappear, Hogan begs her to believe that he schemed only to gain happiness for her; she says that she believes him and will stay on the farm.

An autobiographical play about Eugene O’Neill’s alcoholic older brother, A Moon for the Misbegotten is dramatic realism direct in its simplicity and—like the Hogans’ life and farm—stripped of all but what is essential to its integrity.

The play’s set itself is stark: What the audience sees in all four acts is a side view of the Hogans’ small farmhouse; all of it but Josie’s bedroom is a weathered-gray clapboard, and the bedroom itself is covered with tar paper. Before the house and the three steps leading to the door of Josie’s room is a dirt yard in the middle of which is a large, flat-topped boulder that Tyrone uses as a sort of table on which to set his whiskey during act 3. O’Neill calls for the removal of the house’s living room wall for all of act 2. With the wall removed, the audience is allowed to watch Josie rise from the front steps, as the act opens, and stumble around in the living room until she lights a kerosene lantern, revealing the room’s sparse furnishings and, on a bureau, an alarm clock that indicates the time, five minutes past eleven—two hours after Tyrone was supposed to have come to visit her. Clearly O’Neill intends to show that, while the little the Hogans own is old and rudimentary and not worth much, what they themselves bring to it makes it a home. Most important, the playwright intends for the house to be emblematic of Hogan and Josie, insofar as, like them, it is “placed so perfectly in its setting that it appears a harmonious part of the landscape, rooted in the earth.”

Aside from the set, noteworthy are the demands this play imposes upon the actors portraying Josie and Tyrone, for O’Neill requires that the latter deliver a monologue during the third act that extends over several pages, and he requires that the former appear natural and attentive as she listens to it. Furthermore, Tyrone’s monologue about his mother and his guilt, as well as about the hatred he feels toward his dead father and himself, demands an actor of consummate skill to keep the audience’s attention and avoid a maudlin, monotonous tone. As for the actor who portrays Josie, she must be “so oversize for a woman that she is almost a freak. . . .” While she “is more powerful than any but an exceptionally strong man,” O’Neill indicates in his directions that “there is no mannish quality about her. She is all woman.” In the course of the play, Josie must appear strong but vulnerable, bawdy but sensitive, lusty but maternal, hard as nails but compassionate. Indeed, Josie Hogan is considered by many to be one of the great heroines of twentieth century drama.