By Joseph Hurley
Quality Irish an Irish-oriented theater will take a heavy hit this Sunday afternoon when two of the most heavily lauded and richly acclaimed productions of recent seasons reach the end of their runs.
Uptown, the current revival of Eugene O’Neill’s last completed play, "A Moon for the Misbegotten," written in 1943 but not seen in New York until 1957, will face its final audience with Sunday’s matinee at the Walter Kerr Theatre on West 48th Street, with the stage lights dimming out on the play’s towering final scene, one of the most powerful the playwright ever wrote, at about 5:30.
Thirty minutes later and 26 blocks south, the final words of Sebastian Barry’s "Our Lady of Sligo" will be heard for the last time in the cozy, welcoming little auditorium that is the home of the Irish Repertory Theatre.
There is a kind of small, unseen irony linking the two plays. In 1957, when "A Moon for the Misbegotten" finally reached Broadway, the role of Phil Hogan, the cranky old Irish pig farmer, a tenant on the Tyrone family’s Connecticut estate, was played by Cyril Cusack, the Dublin star whose daughter, Sinéad, is playing the title role in playwright Barry’s brilliant, demanding tragicomedy.
Indeed, parallels abound. Sebastian Barry draws extensively from his own complicated family history. The character played by actress Cusack, Mai Kerwin O’Hara, is based on the writer’s maternal grandmother. Barry’s mother, Joan O’Hara, is one of the Irish theater’s most successful character actresses, and, as is the playwright’s habit, he has used the actual names of the relatives about whom he is writing.
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O’Neill renamed his own family, "Tyrone," but based the "characters" in both "A Moon for the Misbegotten" and what is probably his greatest play, "Long Day’s Journey Into Night," on his mother, his father and, especially, his brother.
Where Sebastian Barry’s portrait of Mai O’Hara is based on excellent research, since his grandmother died before he was born, O’Neill’s renderings of his family members are grounded in painful, possibly somewhat distorting personal experience, with all the wounds and bruises still smarting in the 1939-41 period, the years in which he wrote "Long Day’s Journey Into Night."