NEW YORK (AP) — She storms out of the tilting shanty of a farmhouse in full fury.This self-described “ugly, overgrown lump of a woman” is a force of nature, an earth mother of surprising strength and heart at the centre of Eugene O’Neill’s classic “A Moon for the Misbegotten”.

The weather-beaten creature in question is named Josie Hogan and as portrayed by Eve Best, she is one of the glories of the current Broadway season. Best is making her New York debut in this English import, which opened on Monday at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. It would be a serious mistake to miss her extraordinary performance, a remarkable balancing act of power and vulnerability, sexuality and innocence.

Josie is a woman in love, besotted by a wastrel of man whom she tries to redeem or at least save from self-destruction. And Best makes the most of Josie’s heroic efforts.

Yet the production, courtesy of London’s Old Vic Theatre Company, is a marvel not only for the actress, but for her equally adept co-stars, Kevin Spacey (who runs the Old Vic) and Colm Meaney.

It’s all the more startling because “Moon” is not an unknown quantity on Broadway. This is the play’s fourth major revival since it first opened in New York in 1957, and it ranks with the legendary Colleen Dewhurst-Jason Robards production that resurrected the play’s reputation in the early 1970s.

Credit director Howard Davies and his cast with finding the play’s considerable heartbreak and humour and making its nearly three hours fly swiftly by.

Set in rural Connecticut in 1923, “Moon” could be subtitled “Long Night’s Journey Into Day” in honour of its pivotal moon-drenched encounter between Josie and Spacey’s Jim Tyrone. Jim is a demon- and alcohol-possessed actor whose family owns the land farmed by Josie and her cantankerous, liquor-fuelled father.

Spacey, nattily decked out like a Broadway dandy of the 1920s, gives a carefully crafted performance. With his shy, almost impish smile, he ingratiatingly captures the man’s surface joviality. It’s a jokey slickness masking a guilt-riddled despair, a sorrow that explodes when he has had too much to drink.

That explosion occurs late in the play when Jim talks to Josie about his mother’s death and how he disreputably dealt with it. Josie’s description of him as “a dead man walking” is totally apt, and Jim’s confessional is unsparing in its morbidity.

O’Neill’s dated language can be melodramatic, even florid, but Spacey has the gift of making these outbursts sound painfully genuine.

The playwright also takes a stereotype such as the affable, drunk Irishman and turns it on its ear. Josie’s wily father — “a wicked old tick” according to his daughter — is generous and warm despite his combative dealings with his daughter. And Meaney, playing the old reprobate, doesn’t miss an opportunity to get a laugh.

O’Neill takes his time in setting up that late-night assignation between Josie and Jim. Act 1 unfolds leisurely with Josie’s younger brother Mike (Eugene O’Hare) fleeing the homestead to seek his fortune in Bridgeport. And there’s great fun to be had when a snooty neighbour (Billy Carter) arrives to complain about Hogan’s errant pigs. The beasts have a bad habit of wandering into his ice pond.

The Hogan farmhouse, designed by Bob Crowley, is weirdly surreal, pitched to one side of the stage and teetering against a bright blue sky. The structure looks as if it could collapse at any moment, much like the relationships in the play.

But then a great sense of yearning envelops “A Moon for the Misbegotten”.

These star-crossed, would-be lovers long to escape: Josie into the arms of Jim, her one true love. Jim, away from the guilt of his mother’s death and a wasted life.

Throughout the evening, train whistles are heard, signalling the inevitability of change. Sort of like the fog horns that pierce the gloom of O’Neill’s masterpiece, “Long Day’s Journey into Night”. They are lonely sounds, but oddly comforting in a world that can never stay the same.