WILLIAMSTOWN — Audra McDonald is waving a club menacingly and chasing a man around the room. It turns out the eminently graceful actress and singer, who is nothing if not artistically versatile, can cut an imposing presence when she wants.
This rehearsal of Eugene O’Neill’s late-period play “A Moon for the Misbegotten” is happening in a spacious upstairs studio, where two glass walls offer a sweeping vista dominated by the Berkshire hills in the distance and clusters of green treetops close by. It’s almost like a grand extension of the play’s pastoral setting — if not for the fact that the farm where McDonald’s character, Josie, lives is described in the script as an unappealing “rockpile, miscalled a farm.”
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The play could be called a sequel of sorts to “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” as it continues the story of one of that play’s characters, James Tyrone Jr., whom O’Neill modeled on his older brother. Williamstown Theatre Festival’s production of “Moon” begins performances Wednesday.
“These are notoriously difficult roles. I wouldn’t want to step out on Broadway to try Josie for the first time,” says McDonald, seated outside the rehearsal room during a lunch break. “It’s great to have a place up here [in the Berkshires] to start to crack it open. It’s a safe, fertile environment in which to take a big risk.” Heightening the stakes is the fact that this is her first time tackling O’Neill onstage.
McDonald, of course, knows from Broadway. Her tally of six Tony Awards is unmatched, as is her feat of winning in all four of the available acting categories. Her two Grammys, for the recording of a Kurt Weill opera, testify to her talent as a concert singer. (Aside from concert performances, she was most recently seen onstage locally in American Repertory Theater’s “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess,” for which she won a Tony after the show moved to Broadway.)
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“Moon” centers on the relationship between Josie and Tyrone, who is landlord of the farm where Josie lives with her brothers and father (played here by Glynn Turman, in whose face McDonald waved that club). The story concerns two wounded souls’ attempt to find a connection despite the heavy weight of their troubled pasts — in other words, O’Neill territory.
This production’s Tyrone is in the hands of Will Swenson, himself a Tony nominee in 2009 for his work in the Public Theater’s revival of “Hair.” The onstage chemistry between these actors has had some time to simmer — McDonald and Swenson were married in 2012. But this is their first time acting opposite each other.
“In many ways it’s like I’m learning something new about my wife — who I know very well. But it’s such an intimate process to go through bringing up a show,” Swenson says, seated alongside his new scene partner, “particularly when it’s an emotional show and a deep show and a show that requires a lot of vulnerability.”
Working outside of New York City and living in the Berkshires for several weeks adds to the intensity of the process, McDonald says. “We go home, we run lines, we come back the next day. We’re just eating and breathing O’Neill, almost 24/7.”
On this day the cast is deep into scene work, trying out alternate line readings and tweaking the emphasis of different dramatic moments under the leadership of director Gordon Edelstein. The mood in the rehearsal room is serious, but loose; an actor blows his nose noisily, and Edelstein quips that the effect should be written into the sound design for the show.
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Edelstein, the longtime artistic director of Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, laughs at the funny bits as if hearing them for the first time, but he’s intimately familiar with the play, having directed it at least three times before.
In a summer otherwise populated by world and American premieres, “Moon” stands out in Williamstown Theatre Festival’s season as a high-profile revival of a work by a playwright with a very bankable name. New artistic director Mandy Greenfield says the production revives the play “in a way that really does crack open the text for audiences in 2015 in a new and different way.”
For one thing, O’Neill wrote of Josie that “the map of Ireland is stamped on her face.” Here, she and her family are African-American.
“If you’re an O’Neill purist, you’re not going to be able to handle us playing it anyway,” McDonald says. “But these are such universal characters.” Tyrone is white, and the idea is that for contemporary audiences the cultural differences between the romantic leads will better suggest their differences in class and social station.
Something that is staying very true to the original text is the raw physicality of Josie, who is described as a very strong woman — both emotionally and physically. “She starts out as this big, hulking thing and by the end she’s sort of a precious little kitty cat,” McDonald says.
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So where does McDonald fall on that scale herself?
“I’m not a little kitty cat, that’s for sure,” she says, flashing a wicked smile. It’s clear her talent for commanding a room translates into many situations — with or without a club to wave around.
A Moon for the Misbegotten
Play by Eugene O’Neill
Directed by Gordon Edelstein
Presented by Williamstown Theatre Festival
At: Main Stage, Williamstown, Aug. 5-23
Tickets: $35-$65,
413-597-3400, www.wtfestival.org
Jeremy D. Goodwin can be reached at jeremy@jeremydgoodwin.com. Follow him on Twitter @jeremydgoodwin.