THEATER

In the fellest of swoops, this region's performance art is totally good to go for at least the remainder of the 21st century. That's because Richard Baird is performing on an area stage again. The Poor Players Theatre Company co-founder, once the central figure in the local Shakespeare troupe's critical success, plays a haughty, button-down moneybags in North Coast Repertory Theatre's A Moon for the Misbegotten-we get him for only five minutes, but it's clear his gig last year with Ashland, Ore.'s famed Oregon Shakespeare Festival has left him none the worse. It's just great to see him, and it sure is nice to think his appearance is part of a trend.

If it isn't, we at least still have playwright Eugene O'Neill. His Misbegotten might not ring any bells right away (unlike Mourning Becomes Electra, which probably led to his 1936 Nobel Prize for literature), but that's because it relies on the personnel instead of memorable plot devices to carry it. To that extent, this entry needs a much stronger actorial sense of itself-but director David Ellenstein is on the right track in some respects, including the spectacular turn he coaxes from one of the cast. You'll take away a lot about O'Neill the man on the strength of his performance alone.

His effort is preceded by a liberal dose of fable-that of native Irishman Phil Hogan and his kids Mike and Josie, tenant farmers on the Connecticut estate of ex-actor James Tyrone Jr. Tyrone's selling the spread, on which next-door millionaire T. Stedman Harder has made a sky-high offer. Broadway's in Tyrone's blood, and Harder's deal is his ticket back there, but Tyrone's feelings for Josie (and vice versa) had once led him to promise he'd sell to the Hogans for a song. As push comes to shove and his loyalties tug at his spirit, he and Josie will wrestle with a collective of personal demons illuminated under the unforgiving moon.

O'Neill drew his inspirations from his personal life, which accounts for the melancholy that marks his works. He'd introduced the stingy, self-absorbed Tyrone in Long Day's Journey into Night two years before, in 1941, as an autobiographical character, replete with the vicious depression and alcoholism from which O'Neill suffered. The author was supposedly on the wagon while he was writing-but you couldn't prove it by Tyrone, who drinks unceasingly through both plays as a shield against his hopeless self-loathing.

And that's where actor David Anthony Smith comes in. I've never seen a better Tyrone, and that has as much to do with Smith's affectations as with the checkered past he's imbued into the role. Tyrone's patronizing sneer, fermenting beneath decades of booze and the public's false adoration; the overly deliberate carriage and practiced turns of the head and shoulders; the exquisitely fine line between lifelong arrogance and regret, manifest in Tyrone's bulky voice: Smith is the whole package and then some, and his performance is a downright honor to his character's creator. Holy cow.

This play's success depends on that kind of effort because the script is so overwhelmingly actor-driven. That's where Ellenstein needs to declare himself. He's cast Karla Kash as Josie, a short-fused firebrand whose hulking presence can cow a man on a dime; the problem is that Ellenstein's given Kash precious little to do. Watch as Josie uneventfully washes the porch, hoists a club, castigates her old man and otherwise stands with her arms at her sides. Kash puts very little kinetic energy behind any of that in what should be easily this show's most physical role.

Jonathan McMurtry suffers from the same kind of mishandling. Phil is a feisty, cantankerous, hard-bitten little prick-in other words, he's way too much like Josie to warrant McMurtry's mostly measured approach to the character. Baird and Brandon Walker, another Poor Players co-founder, are fine in their respective turns as Harder and Mike. The small parts merely advance and bridge some action, and each man plays his without any allusions to the contrary.

Marty Burnett's scene designs are at their best when they're at their most rustic, and that's what he has going here. The set's unpretentious, lived-in look is handmaiden to Jeanne Reith's costumes, which are plays unto themselves. The rest of the tech effort helps fuel an uneven but earnest look at some unadorned Eugene O'Neill. He would take refuge from his tumultuous personal history in his characters, from whom he'd never really escape. In the process, the American theater was changed forever.

This review is based on the performance of Jan. 19. A Moon for the Misbegotten plays through Feb. 11 at North Coast Repertory Theatre, 987-D Lomas Santa Fe Drive, Solana Beach. $29-$39. 858-481-1055.