onStage – Seated in rocking chairs and shaded from the sun, with a panoramic view of the Allegheny River, it’s easy to see how this place amid the backroads of Longue Vue Club came to be the place for A Moon for the Misbegotten.
The only thing missing to enhance the afternoon chat was moonlight.
“It just was perfect,” director Cody Spellman said of finding the Verona, PA, site for Quantum Theatre’s next production, opening August 2, 2024.
Spellman was joined by cast members Melessie Clark and Wali Jamal in chatting about Eugene O’Neill’s bittersweet play and the wild turkeys, rabbits, deer and “a circling buzzard” that have come to watch rehearsals.
“I love the journey here,” Spellman said of the road that winds past the golf course and the circa-1920s clubhouse. As for the view, “I mean, a million-dollar budget wouldn’t even give us this hillside,” he said.
Previously Quantum’s director of production, Spellman was inspired to approach artistic director Karla Boos about presenting A Moon for the Misbegotten after having worked on a production at Writers Theatre in Chicago, where he often conducted post-show talk-backs. That show cast Black actors in roles traditionally played by white actors.
“What I fell in love with was the play, and how it moved me deeply,” Spellman said. “Looking at the production history and then researching other productions that had cast the Hogan family as Black people, and how well that works and how it spoke to me, I could see that it felt more American, more relevant for this contemporary audience. I was attracted to that in comparison to when it was written, and it being focused on the Hogans as an Irish family.”
Spellman had in mind Pittsburgh native Clark, having had a previous working relationship, on the 2021 short film titled We Are Nowhere.
The very busy actress has since been working from off-Broadway (A Sign of the Times at New World Stages) to the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta (the new musical adaptation of The Preacher’s Wife, with a score by Tituss Burgess). When the Atlanta show ended, Clark went right into Pittsburgh rehearsals for Pittsburgh CLO’s The Color Purple, then directly into prep for A Moon for the Misbegotten.
Clark had been seen mostly in ensemble/understudy roles recently, but now she is front and center as one of American theater’s feistiest female leads, Josie Hogan, a woman who outwardly has the strength to stand up to her tyrannical father, Phil Hogan (Jamal), watch over her brothers and scoff at gossip, but whose vulnerability and compassion are revealed one life-changing night.
“Prior to Cody reaching out to me about it, I had dabbled in some O’Neill when I was in college at Point Park. This one, I wasn’t as familiar with,” Clark said. “So my introduction to it was actually the performance that [Tony-winner and Emmy-nominee] Colleen Dewhurst did of it, and I went down a rabbit hole with her.”
Reading the role for the first time was “incredible,” she said. “I was so empowered by her, but it was also terrifying.”
Clark immediately felt a personal connection, “to the point where I can’t believe that there is a character that’s written like this and articulated so well … feeling like you have to be someone that you’re not and kind of letting your guard down, and who you choose to let your guard down with. So I was kind of astonished by the complexity of the character.”
Those complexities, Clark discovered, are Josie’s “superpower.”
Like his co-star, Jamal has been on the road this summer, recently returning to Pittsburgh from the outdoor St. Louis Shakespeare Festival, where he had played Jacques in As You Like It.
“I’ve read little snippets of O’Neill and other great playwrights, and I can’t help but line him up with Chekhov and August Wilson, because they concentrate on family and on betrayal and on these universal things, so that the play could translate into anything,” Jamal said.
For this particular O’Neill work, Jamal put on his historian’s hat, adding, “I’m not always 100% on board with nontraditional casting; it just depends on the script. And there’s nothing in this script that says that this could not be a Black family in Connecticut. … I know that there were Black regiments fighting in the Revolutionary War and in the War of 1812 in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and even Vermont. … So I’m like, yeah, I could do that, and I could be this guy.”
Jamal, an award-winning actor who has the distinction of having been in productions of every August Wilson play, including the solo show, How I Learned What I Learned, has a role to sink his acting chops into the Hogan patriarch.
“He’s a drinker, and he feels like he’s an independent person. I kind of associate him with Fred Sanford,” Jamal says, comparing his character to Redd Foxx’s on the Sanford and Son TV comedy. “He’s poor, he’s got his own business, and he’s got his pride. And he would not accept handouts, but he’d swindle you real quick. … He’s got his own way of looking at life, attacking life, and incorporating his daughter into his schemes.”
Melessie Clark’s Josie comforts Brett Mack as Jamie in A Moon for the Misbegotten, staged outdoors at Longue Vue Club in Verona. (Image: Jason Snyder)
As the father of three daughters, Jamal also was attracted to the father-daughter relationship between Phil and Josie, and working with Clark again. They both were in the 2015 Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre Company comedy, Dulcy, and Jamal said it is “pure joy” to be working with Clark again.
“There’s scenes that I’ll start choking up, see myself talking to my daughter or maybe having conversations with Melessie that I wish I could have with my own kids,” he said. “So it hits home on a family level.”
The cast also includes Jordan Drake, as Josie’s brother, Mike, and Allen Law, who played Johnny Cash for Pittsburgh Musical Theater’s Million Dollar Quartet in June, as the pompous T. Steadman Harder.
Brett Mack, impressively steadfast as Horatio in Quantum’s stellar Hamlet last summer, plays James “Jamie” Tyrone Jr., the alcoholic failed actor (based on O’Neill’s brother) and the Hogans’ landlord, who is haunted by the death of his mother.
Amid manipulation and lies, Josie and James form an unexpected bond.
A Moon for the Misbegotten, a follow-up to O’Neill’s autobiographical, Pulitzer Prize-winning Long Day’s Journey Into Night, didn’t make as big a splash when it hit Broadway in 1957. However, the 1973 Colleen Dewhurst-Jason Robards-Ed Flanders revival was hailed as a “landmark” production and raked in a bunch of awards before being made into a TV movie.
Addictions are central to several O’Neill characters, as they were among his real-life family members. Jamie Tyrone mirrors Jamie O’Neill Jr., Eugene’s older brother, an alcoholic who died in a sanitarium at age 45.
“It is a delicate ballet dance [for Brett Mack] to navigate,” director Spellman said of Jamie Tyrone’s expressed debilitated state. “But ultimately, we can’t let it get in the way of the relationships, the love that we must explore.”
Despite the unhealthy aspects of the Josie-James relationship, Spellman noted that “there’s also something really inspiring about the transparency of just throwing out any sort of inhibitions and just saying that you are loved, you are supported, you are worthy of happiness.”
Other cast and crew members began to arrive at the site, signaling rehearsals were about to begin, with dusk still a couple of hours away.
The director wanted to part with what he had just described as the eventual “transparency” among the characters in A Moon for the Misbegotten, or what Clark had described as finding someone who inspires Josie to lower her guard and show some vulnerability.
“I hope that’s something that the audience can walk away with,” Spellman said, “that feeling of being a little bit more enabled to speak their truth, or inspired to say what they really mean, especially to our loved ones.”
TICKETS AND DETAILS
Quantum Theatre’s A Moon for the Misbegotten runs August 2-25, 2024 at the “sporting clay fields” of Longue Vue Club, 400 Longue Vue Drive, Verona, PA 15147. Tickets and directions: https://www.quantumtheatre.com/moon/
