The ravaged James Tyrone on display at City Center Stage II in the Pearl Theater Company’s sure-footed revival of “A Moon for the Misbegotten,” as played by Andrew May, has got a certain quality. He’s downright ... unexceptional.

This may sound like a criticism. It’s not. It actually signals a vote of confidence in the durability of the role, one of Eugene O’Neill’s most unsparing yet most generous, by Mr. May and his director, J. R. Sullivan. And it helps further to cement O’Neill’s final completed play, a semi-sequel to “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” as one of the 20th century’s greatest romances.

The 1947 “Moon,” a rustic comedy that slides first gingerly and then precipitously into self-flagellating anguish, is known primarily for the other half of the love story at its center. Colleen Dewhurst and Cherry Jones are just two of the women who have stamped their mark on the formidable Josie Hogan, who never leaves the stage during the play’s more-than-three-hour run time.

But the first two acts — there are four, and they are sizable — spend long stretches anticipating the arrival of James, a former third-rate stage actor and current first-rate alcoholic. (The part is based closely on O’Neill’s wastrel brother, Jamie, whom Eugene worshiped and who died of alcohol poisoning.)

James is also the landlord of the Connecticut farm that Josie (a fine Kim Martin-Cotten) and her reprobate father, Phil (Dan Daily), have tended for 20 years. When that tenancy begins to look in peril, the Hogans hatch a plan to convert a longstanding flirtation between Josie and James into a bourbon-induced shotgun marriage.

Living up to O’Neill’s portentous setups isn’t easy for anyone in the role of James, and many have responded by playing this actor in a very actorly way. In the two most recent Broadway revivals, Gabriel Byrne dripped with Gaelic melancholy, while Kevin Spacey’s near-vaudevillian turn reminded the New York Times critic Ben Brantley of “a frog on a hot plate.”

Enter Mr. May, who tries something completely different by seemingly not trying. This James, who has watched “too goddamned many dawns creeping grayly over too many dirty windows,” himself seems to have been begrimed. Josie’s callused grandeur and James’s big-city malaise, so often played in marked counterpoint, here feel of a piece.

Transcendence won’t come easy for either of them, as both Mr. May’s haggard bonhomie and Ms. Martin-Cotten’s grasping insecurity clearly demonstrate. And when it does come, Mr. Sullivan’s patient, empathic staging makes it all the more satisfying.

And if the pacing occasionally meanders? Well, that’s to be expected from a play in which tumblersful of bourbon are treated like shot glasses in the predawn hours. All in all, this “Moon” illuminates O’Neill’s unlikely lovers with a bruising and yet benevolent glow.