PLAYBILL ON OPENING NIGHT: A Moon for the Misbegotten — Best Foot Forward
By Harry Haun
10 Apr 2007
Eve Best bolted onto Broadway April 9 like a hungry cougar hunting for fresh prey, flying through the screen door of the highly stylized ramshackle shack Bob Crowley had devised for A Moon for the Misbegotten and planting herself solidly on the Brooks Atkinson stage, giving no ground and taking no prisoners for two hours and 50 minutes.
There was no welcoming applause from the audience for this bold entrance, but by evening's end every manjack of them was standing, cheering the arrival of a full-blown star. (She apparently got her act together out of town — in London where she's been raking in awards since '99. Indeed, she was up for an Olivier in February for this very portrayal.)
She's rough-hewn Josie Hogan, the pig-farmer's daughter — hardly the "great ugly cow of
a girl" that Eugene O'Neill envisioned — but acted in a way that will convince you that your eyes are deceiving you. With the blunt, graceless swagger of someone who has been
brought up on a farm, she walks the tightrope of madonna/whore — her mission in the play
to administer tender mercies to a broken-down, boozed-up Broadway actor, Jim Tyrone
Jr., during a long, heart-wrenching evening of shared secrets and spilled bonded bourbon.
This production is also a best foot forward for the "new" Old Vic and its artistic director,
Kevin Spacey, who sensibly as well as chivalrously takes second billing to Best. With the blessing of Actors' Equity, the whole five-member cast made the jump across the
pond — including the also-Olivier-nominated Colm Meaney as Josie's crafty pa and an actor born to play Eugene O'Neill, Eugene O'Hare, as another of the Hogan clan.
O'Neill aficionado Howard Davies, who directed Spacey in The Iceman Cometh and
Best in Mourning Becomes Electra, supervised the Broadway transfer right up until the weekend when he had to return to London to start up rehearsals for another play.
First-nighters broke in a brand-new opening-night party site, named for its address: 230
Fifth Avenue (at 27th Street). The restaurant, on the 20th floor, was a chairless affair,
done in low-slung, black-velvet sofas that required eating with a plate in your lap. Elegant
if joint-wrenching. One floor up was an observation deck that offered spectacular views
of the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building, both lighting up the night sky.
Red robes were provided for those adventurous enough to brave the beyond-blustery
night air.
Best arrived still reeling from the rigors of the play and the pressure of opening night and
couldn't quite assess her feelings about her hour-old Broadway beachhead. "It hasn't
really sunk in yet, to be honest," she confessed in that cheery British manner. "It's all a bit overwhelming. Wonderful. But also a bit speechless, as you can tell. I'm really excited to be here, and I feel very lucky to be here as well. I'm really thrilled we all made it here."
To separate her Moons and give herself a little breather from O'Neill, she managed to
squeeze in a little Shakespeare back in London, wrapping As You Like It just three days
before she flew to New York for rehearsals. She chose to do the comedy to give herself
something to think about other than Broadway. "The minute I started thinking too much
about Broadway, I would know I had completely forgotten about doing As You Like It."
Her Broadway debut could be called the Americanization of Emily since that is what
everyone seems to be calling her offstage. "My real name is Emily, and Eve is my
grandmother's middle name," she explained. "I had to change it because there was
another actress named Emily Best. I wanted to change my second name, but there were
already so many Emilys all the names I wanted to choose to go with it had been taken."
Spacey was more wired than wiped out by the O'Neill ordeal. "I'm not exhausted — I'm
loving it," he exclaimed. "We were supposed to have our opening Sunday, but we then
decided it was Easter and probably not a good idea, so we moved it to today. Tomorrow's
our first day off since last Monday. We've done nine in a row, going like a house afire."
He admitted to being a bit glassy-eyed at the curtain call. "The play is an emotional play,
and it does get to you. And the truth is: opening nights are emotional. It's a big thing to finally open this play and to share it with an American audience and to have all your
friends and family and colleagues here as well. It's a milestone for us at the Old Vic,
bringing our first play to New York, and it's certainly not going to the last we bring here."
Actually, the first handiwork of his three-year regime at the Old Vic surfaced at the
Brooklyn Academy of Music just before the rising of this Moon — Edward Hall's rep spin
of Twelfth Night and The Taming of the Shrew. It went down so well, Spacey said, there will be more where it came from. "We just announced The Bridge Project — Sam Mendes directing six plays over the next three years in rep, starting at BAM and going to the Old Vic so we have a permanent presence in New York at BAM. It's a fantastic relationship."
Half of Spacey's Broadway career has been spent at the Brooks Atkinson. He began there
as Liv Ullmann's son in Ibsen's Ghosts in 1982, and it was there that labored with some Tony-nominated distinction as Hickey in O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh. "It does feel like
home," he readily admitted. "Acoustically, it's very different from the Old Vic, but you adjust to that. [The stage] doesn't have the depth the Old Vic has. We had about 25 feet beyond the [Hogan] shack, so we made these loooooong entrances in London that have become very truncated here. The stage is wider so it takes a little longer to get to the chair and to the fountain, but you make those minor technical adjustments and the rest of it is about the emotional life that these characters are experiencing. For us, it's like getting back on the horse."
He will be posting the upcoming season at the Old Vic next month, and he expects to be
on the boards again in January (not in an O'Neill play). He managed to squeeze in a flick
between Moons. "I finished it weeks ago. It's called '21,' and it's based on a true story about a group of M.I.T. students who learned the art of card-counting at the game of blackjack and went to Vegas and made millions of dollars on their weekends. I play the
professor who teaches them how to count, and I'm producing it with Sony Pictures."
Moon is Meaney's first Broadway appearance in 20 years — since he co-starred with Derek Jacobi in Hugh Whitemore's Breaking the Code — and his first New York appearance since he played the doctor role that won Michael Caine an Oscar in a play whose title escaped us both [it was "The Cider House Rules," the stage version of which played at Atlantic Theater Company]. The always-reliable film actor is perhaps
best-remembered as the Presley-worshipping Dublin patriarch in "The Commitments."
"The last Moon for the Misbegotten I saw was in the '80s here in New York with Ian Bannen and Kate Nelligan," he said. "I think it contains some of O'Neill's best writing. The characters are very rich, deep — and the great thing is that they (as people do) don't mean what they say a lot of the time. What they're actually saying is not really what they mean — there's something else going on all the time — and it's wonderful to play that."
Meaney mines a lot of welcomed laughs out of his cagey old tenant farmer. "We didn't
get too many of them tonight," he allowed. "It was a very non-laughing audience tonight.
But, over the course of previews, there's frequently quite a bit of laughing going on." Continued...
