The duplicity of addiction, promiscuity

Tales of the walking dead are not just the stuff of zombie flicks or well-known television shows.

In “A Moon for the Misbegotten,” the latest Adobe Theater production, playwright Eugene O’Neill tells a tale of “a dead man, walking slowly behind his own coffin.”

According to the director’s notes, the play was written when O’Neill’s hands shook so badly from Parkinson’s disease that he could barely write. The playwright’s brother Jamie was an alcoholic who drank himself to death at the age of 44, and O’Neill wrote the play in an attempt to forgive his brother, as well as to forgive himself for not doing more to help.

Jamie is depicted by the character of Jim Tyrone, played by Vernon Poitras. Jim is the landlord of a farm occupied and run by Phil Hogan, played by Scott Sharot, and his daughter Josie, played by Lorri Oliver. The play begins lightheartedly as the sun sets before Jim and Josie’s moonlight date, but the mood soon plummets along with the sun.

The characters spend most of the play trying to deceive one another into believing they are people they aren’t. Josie talks up her fabricated reputation as the village’s loose woman and is reprimanded by Jim, who wants her to be herself for just one night. Jim is tortured by memories of doling out $50 a night to a whore who, in conjunction with his round-the-clock drunkenness, kept him distracted from a skeleton he keeps in his closet until his and Josie’s moonlight rendezvous. He wants this night to be unlike all the others.

Josie knows Jim is destined to drink himself to death and acquiesces to this fate by serving him drink after drink after drink of whiskey. He talks strangely and stares off as if into the eyes of his own ghost.

The moon sheds light on both of their realities. Jim needs to be loved, not to pay someone for her momentary company. Josie does her best to help him, but like anyone who is close to an addict, there’s nothing she can do for Jim, who refuses to help himself.

What people perceive to be the reality of addicts such as Jim, who goes about his daily business as if nothing is wrong, is nothing like the darkness that keeps them from experiencing true happiness. It is easier for the characters to accept their facades as true and to transform their concerns into jokes after watching someone down half a tumbler of whiskey in one gulp. The challenge is for Jim to forgive himself and accept Josie’s love, and for her to forgive him and accept his love in return.

With the exception of a minor character, the players are seasoned actors and actresses. They ably take on the task of portraying characters who cobble together an untrue life. The Irish accents garble bits of dialogue here and there, especially because the actors tend to rush their lines during some of the more passionate scenes; but, on the whole, the play is an authentic portrayal of common human struggle whose message stays with you after curtain call.