Byrne, back to battle O’Neill

ON paper, Gabriel Byrne should be happy right now. He’s back on Broadway, starring in a play he loves by a playwright he reveres. The production, a Roundabout Theatre Company revival of Eugene O’Neill’s “A Touch of the Poet,” allows him to live at his Brooklyn Heights town house, see his kids regularly and exercise his considerable stage muscles while waiting for the release of two new films he says he’s quite proud of. So why does he seem like he’s nursing a nasty hangover of philosophical despair?

“This is a tremendously physical play,” Byrne says, looking handsomely rumpled in a black V-neck sweater at a table in the studio where he and his director, Doug Hughes, have just completed a rough afternoon of scene work. “But there’s another level of energy that’s drained from you, and that’s the emotional energy. You can’t hide with O’Neill. You have to go there, or not go there at all. It requires everything from you physically, emotionally and mentally. I worry about how I’ll be able to sustain it because we’re only in the second week of rehearsal and I’m already beginning to feel a tiredness in my bones.”

If playing an alcoholic is hard on an actor, playing one in a garrulous O’Neill psychodrama must be murder. Fortunately, Byrne, who doesn’t mind all the wobbly poeticizing, is an experienced hand. He was nominated for a Tony Award in 2000 for his performance in “A Moon for the Misbegotten” as James Tyrone Jr., a character every bit as hard-drinking as the bullying, Byron-quoting patriarch he portrays in “A Touch of the Poet.”

Byrne’s not the first actor to try this exact double shot of O’Neill on Broadway. Jason Robards scored Tony nominations for his work in groundbreaking 1970s revivals of “A Touch of the Poet” and “A Moon for the Misbegotten,” both of which were praised for revealing the visceral emotion of O’Neill’s demanding art.

Robards’ precedent makes Byrne’s task all the more challenging. Yet according to Cherry Jones, who was Byrne’s costar in “A Moon for the Misbegotten,” he needn’t worry about maintaining his intensity. “I’ve heard that Jason Robards, who I hold above all others, would be brilliant on certain nights, but maybe would phone it in on others. Gabriel was right to the wall every time. He’s very exposed and raw, and he seems to feed off the brilliant, messy, convoluted, even grotesque aspects of O’Neill’s difficult language.”

“A Touch of the Poet,” which opens Dec. 8 at Studio 54 on Broadway, was first conceived by O’Neill in the mid-’30s as part of a never-to-be-realized 11-play cycle about 200 years in the life of an American family. He finished a draft of the play in 1939 and the final version in 1942, a period in which he also completed his autobiographical masterpiece, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” Though the works diverge in tone and method, both grapple with the painfully contradictory figure of O’Neill’s father, and both were produced only posthumously.

At the center of “A Touch of the Poet” roars Cornelius “Con” Melody, an Irish immigrant tavern owner in early 19th century Boston who’s lost in the memories of his former military and amorous glory. Given to parading around in his old Duke of Wellington cavalry uniform, tyrannizing his family and browbeating the drunken customers who refuse to worship at the shrine of his romanticized self-image, he has been described as what O’Neill’s father would have become had he not discovered his profession of acting. Through the embattled engagement of his waitress daughter to the scion of aristocrats who don’t want anything to do with rowdy barkeeps, Con is forced to confront the way he’s been conning himself about his elevated status in America.

Reviewing the 1977 Robards production for the New York Times, Richard Eder offered a verdict that’s been pretty much the same ever since the work’s debut: “Not one of his greatest plays, but it has greatness in it. It is a difficult greatness to pry out fully in performance.”

Looking as weary as his star, Hughes fully acknowledges the directorial hurdles yet finds something compelling “about the extravagant, myth-like way in which O’Neill approaches one of the paradoxes of life: The people closest to us -- family, loved ones -- can be both reprehensible and indispensable to us.”

As Byrne puts it in his hypnotic Irish lilt, “The questions O’Neill grapples with are the ones that make you look in the mirror and examine who you really are and who you pretend to be. What mask do you have on, and what mirror are you looking into? And what do you see in the mirror of other people’s faces?”

Respect from peers

BEST known for his work in “Miller’s Crossing” and “The Usual Suspects,” Byrne has had a varied career that has won him more respect from his peers than Hollywood success. Starting off as a stage actor in Dublin and later London, he went on to make a quietly combustible impression in numerous small-budget films, took a detour into producing (credits include “In the Name of the Father”) and even wrote a memoir titled “Pictures in My Head,” which recounts his Irish upbringing and his flirtation with becoming a priest.

It’s hard to imagine Byrne in a collar, if only because the image would prove so disappointing to his legion of female fans. Still a poster boy (at age 55) for the indie-movie set, he’s frequently described as “brooding,” a word he claims to understand only in terms of hens and eggs, his dark hair, burning blue eyes and craggy silences are summed up by the other definition.

Ask Jones about what it’s like to work with Byrne and she’ll tell you about getting mobbed outside the stage door.

“It was like exiting with a rock star,” she says. “Women lose their minds over him. I remember this group of Japanese women who got a hotel for three or four weeks and came to the show every night just to see him. I’m glad I didn’t have a clue who he was until after I was already working with him. I would have been star-struck.”

Fiercely determined to live away from the public glare, Byrne protects his and his family’s privacy at all costs, which explains not only his Brooklyn address but his reticence when it comes to his personal life. There’s no mention of his ex-wife, Ellen Barkin, with whom he shares custody of his two kids, or any other involvement for that matter. The most he’ll offer is that he’s developing a movie based on a British novel about “romantic expectation and commitment,” a pair of themes that fascinate him, he says.

Jazzed as he is about two of his upcoming films, Richard E. Grant’s “Wah-Wah” (costarring Emily Watson) and Ray Lawrence’s “Jindabyne” (costarring Laura Linney), what really loosens the tongue of this consummate Irishman, as Jones describes him, is literature -- Beckett, Joyce, Ibsen, Chekhov, Shakespeare. Byrne is not only well-read, but well-spoken, his conversation churning with deeply considered remarks on the writers who have shaped him.

O’Neill, of course, is foremost among them. What Byrne appreciates is the playwright’s struggle to wrest some hard truth from the sentimental self-deception around us: “He doesn’t give you the Disney ending that says all conflicts can be resolved with a hug and an orchestra playing behind it. Life is much more complex and ambiguous than that. You can be happy yet sad. You can have your heart’s desire and still not be happy. You can be with the person you’re really meant to be with and still not be fulfilled in the deepest ways. It’s like that line in Beckett: ‘What do we do now that we’re happy?’ ”

As for himself, Byrne is perhaps too introspective for easy contentment. “As a human being, you cannot exist in one state permanently. I don’t know if it’s possible to be happy in the world that we’re in now. Because to be happy means, in a sense, that you are indifferent. You ignore facts. Well, I can’t really do it. On the hand, I’m not really sad or melancholic, either. I think that life is heartbreakingly beautiful some days, miserable others. And then most of the time it’s not one thing or the other. It’s just gray.”

‘Like I’ve come full circle’

HE says that it was with an old girlfriend, a woman he had been involved with for more than 12 years who later died of cancer, that he first saw “A Touch of the Poet,” in a stirring London production with Timothy Dalton and Vanessa Redgrave.

“At the end of the performance, she said that I should do the play,” he recalls. “It’s been a long time since then, but it feels like I’ve come full circle.”

O’Neill referred to “A Touch of the Poet” as an “Irish play,” Byrne insists his connection has nothing to do with any Celtic kinship. “We don’t even think of O’Neill as an Irish playwright in Ireland,” he says. “The issues he deals with are universal. The play’s examination of love, for example -- is it always enough? -- is very profound, provocative and sometimes disturbing.”

“I think it cost O’Neill an enormous amount psychically to write what he did,” he says.

“Because he wrote about his family, about people who he really loved, and he took these people and he took their pain and he made it the pain of everybody. We are the better because he went there.”