Through Irish eyes
Associated PressPublished December 26, 2005
NEW YORK - The first time Gabriel Byrne read Eugene O'Neill's A Touch of the Poet , he threw it at the wall.
"Nobody will go see this," he thought. "It's not a good play."
Then he picked it up and began to list in the back of the book the themes he thought O'Neill was dealing with: love, exile, loss, memory, pride, marriage, shame, addiction, sin.
On the list went, covering topics ranging from sex to war, nearly two columns of markings in black ink.
Two years later, Byrne is in the role of Cornelius "Con" Melody in the Roundabout Theatre Company's revival of A Touch of the Poet , playing at Studio 54.
"All I can say is that I wouldn't really change any word on that page," Byrne said, holding his dog-eared copy of the play filled with notes and observations during an interview in his dressing room. "But I could fill another two pages with things I've discovered since."
It is that depth of character and plot that drew Byrne back to the New York stage for the second time. And for the second time, he is performing a work by O'Neill, the great dramatist who remains the only American playwright to win the Nobel Prize.
Byrne's Broadway debut came in 2000 when he starred opposite Cherry Jones in A Moon for the Misbegotten . He received a Tony nomination for his work and realized for the first time the scope of O'Neill's writing, which he truly began to appreciate only after trying to interpret it.
"The profundity and the complexity of O'Neill's work is fascinating. Like any great artist, I think his ambition is to be fearless in telling the truth," Byrne said. "O'Neill never candified or sweetened life in a false or insincere way. His plays are always about trying to find what it is about human beings that makes them the incredibly contradictory and complex characters that they are."
A 55-year-old native of Dublin, Ireland, with wavy black hair streaked with gray and a brogue that immediately recalls his native soil, Byrne looks as if he stepped out of an O'Neill play.
Best known for his leading man roles in films such as Miller's Crossing , Byrne still looks as if he would have no problem getting the girl. But his face is now lined, and when he puts on reading glasses to glance at a note he has jotted down, he resembles a college professor more than the suave thief he played in The Usual Suspects .
It is that look - one that can evoke the memories of past glories while still managing to convey a character beyond his prime - that makes Byrne seem especially suited for the role of Con Melody.
Melody is an Irishman who was once a celebrated officer in the British army under Wellington and is now running a shabby tavern outside of Boston. In the year A Touch of the Poet is set, 1828, Melody finds himself a drunken shadow of his old self. He rails against presidential candidate Andrew Jackson, calling him "that idol of the riffraff," and quotes Byron to himself in the mirror in an accent that is decidedly more English than Irish. He puts on his strikingly red Army uniform in memory of former triumphs on the battlefield and speaks of honor and position.
But his customers laugh behind his back, and his daughter, Sara, despises him for the psychological torment he unleashes on his wife and her mother, Nora. He envisions the marriage of Sara to a "gentleman," only to realize that the boy's family wants no part of a lower-class family such as his. When the audience first sees Melody, his hands are shaking because he needs a drink.
"The character's need to see himself in a certain light, that light of an officer and a gentleman, has a universal significance," director Doug Hughes said. "We need to believe that our purpose here is noble, that we stand for something."
Hughes calls Melody "one of the fiendishly difficult parts that I can imagine" and he believes Byrne fits it perfectly.
"The role demands an actor go to extremes and not only extremes, but opposite extremes," he said. "Here is an actor that can fulfill both the North and the South Pole of this role."
The experience has clearly taxed Byrne. His face looks drawn, and he acknowledges being physically and emotionally "wiped out" by the rehearsals and performances. He considers O'Neill's language more difficult to learn than Shakespeare's, primarily because Shakespeare's has meters and rhythms that can be followed.
"I think that O'Neill demands 120 percent of an actor's emotional, physical and mental commitment," Byrne said. "It's not like if you're playing Oscar Wilde . . . or Moliere, where you can hide behind the style. O'Neill isn't about style, though he is a very stylish writer. O'Neill is about confronting raw emotions."
A Touch of the Poet has never been highly ranked in the playwright's canon. But Byrne believes that is simply a matter of the play having not been performed as often as works such as Long Day's Journey Into Night, The Iceman Cometh and A Moon for the Misbegotten .
A Touch of the Poet was first produced in 1958, five years after O'Neill's death. It is the only completed play of a planned 11-play cycle that O'Neill hoped would illuminate the Irish immigrant experience in America.
Since then it has been produced intermittently. It was last on Broadway nearly 30 years ago. Byrne saw a London production starring Timothy Dalton and Vanessa Redgrave in 1988. There have been others, and esteemed actors, and noted O'Neill interpreters, such as Jason Robards and Brian Dennehy have tackled the role of Con Melody.
"My burning hope for this play is that people will come to see it in a new light," Byrne said. "And if they have never seen it before to be introduced to the crazy, wacky, wild world of this brilliant, tortured American-Irish genius."