A TOUCH OF THE POET (all Reviews welcome) — Page 2

Thank you, thank you, Rath.

Great review, I can't wait to see it!

Peter Pan collar and all, Glebby!

---

So good to read about something that doesn't mention Rent, Idina or Wicked!

Anyone else seen this yet? Planning to?

---

My pleasure. I hope you get to see it. I know there are discounts available.

---

Saw the Friday night performance, and while the play itself is no great shakes, I think Gabriel Byrne gives one of the most brilliant performances I have seen in some 30 years of theatre-going. Rathnait 62 is right--Byrne gets everything there is to get (and then some) from the role. Only Byron Jennings and Kathryn Meisle come anywhere near Byrne in their much-smaller roles. Overall, a solid production with a fabulous central performance.

Rathnait 62: Molloy was very good, but sometimes, during the performance I saw, she seemed not to be "in the moment," as they say, and I was noticing her acting technique rather than being compelled by the character. There were flashes when she was great, but not consistently, at least not that Friday night--she may have been having a semi-"off" night, which everyone has now and then.

Saw it this afternoon

It is a long play. Some of what is said is hard to understand due to Bryne's Irish ( as opposed to italian ) brogue

Having said that it is a very good piece of theater . Bryne, as always, is great & the rest of the cast is exceptional. The score by Sondheim really fits. The set was very good & it had the feel of the period. Bryne makes the show what it is . It dragged before he came on but whenever he is on stage it really holds your attention . O Neill is really a great playwright & seeing one of his works for the first time is a treat. It is kind of like seeing a classic movie for the first time. Bryne deserves the Tony this time especially since he should have gotten it for " A Moon For The Misbegotten"

I had never seen this work by O Neill so it was new to me. The theater ( Studio 54 ) is in horrible shape. The plasterwork near the procenium & parts of the procenium itself are missing. The main chandelier was never replaced. It is a georgeous theater in need of renovation

---

Updated On: 11/27/05 at 07:30 PM

I saw the play Thursday night, December 1.

O'Neill's plays are not laugh out loud entertainment. I have never lost myself in mindlessness seeing one of his plays, but fall into self-reflection. Just like when I saw Kevin Spacey in "The Iceman Cometh", "A Touch of the Poet" makes me feel disgust at failures in my own life and self-recognition of what a boor I can be -- vis-a-vis Con in 'Poet. Some of the writing, though prose, is so poetic, so perfect, that I feel guilty that I have not read the script before I've seen the show.

Yes, this is worthwhile to see and the play stays with you afterwards.

The cast is very good across the board. Kathryn Meisle was excellent as Deborah, the unseen Stephen's mother. I was not really conscious of Emily Bergl acting, as some wrote here. Gabriel Byrne's Cornelius is a late stage alcoholic, from time to time drifting into paranoia, and Byrne portrays the posture, hand gestures, and grimaces seen in late stage alcoholics.

Cornelius infatuation with his uniform reminded me of F.W. Murnau's "The Last Laugh" (1924) -- here's a reference to roger ebert on that
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20000305/REVIEWS08/3050301/1023

The set of the inn is huge and a bit foreboding, but it works well for this show. Con wouldn't have had the money to own an inn as big as what we see on stage. The costumes and lighting all seem of a piece with the story and work well. The uilleann pipes -- the live music onstage -- and the prerecorded music really helped set the mood.

This morning I searched for reveiews of other productions and found this from 1958:
New York Journal-American, October 3, 1958
O'Neill Again Proves He's Incomparable
By JOHN MCCLAIN

“A Touch of the Poet,” which opened at the handsomely renovated Helen Hayes Theatre last night is not one of Eugene O’Neill’s great plays, but even as one of his lesser ones it proves again that he is majestically alone in the American theatre. One is apt to forget his extraordinary talent: the great gift of drawing characters in depth, then pitting them one against the other will all nerves exposed.

This latest of his posthumous works to be offered in America is first of all a searing character study: There is the cruel and sodden ex-officer in the British Army who is operating a tavern in the vicinity of Boston, circa 1828. He lives in a drunken dream of past glories and a gentility to which he was not born.

There is his wife, the adoring biddy he plucked from the peat bogs of his native Ireland. Her fierce devotion remains constant through all his tirades against the immigrant poor and the rising commercial aristocracy of the New World, neither of which class will accept him.

There is his daughter, resentful of his swaggering deceit, yet strangely possessed of the same pride which provokes it.

And there is the mother of a young man whose roots are deep in America, who is fighting for the survival of her son in a new society which has little use for the poetic postures of the Old World.

Finally, there is the young man. He never appears onstage, but he is the voice of a thoughtful and awakened new land.

These characters are created with intensity and full dimension, and they immediately catch us. When they are finally brought to grips we are transported by the conflict between father and daughter, his insane reaction to the patronizing Yankee mother and his abortive attempt to engage her husband in a duel.

In a gentler mood we are moved by the off-stage romance of the daughter and the poetic young man, the unreasoning love of the mother for both her husband and daughter. And the final moments in which the father, at long last, gives up his losing battle.

That it is not a much greater play is due to the fact that the people themselves, however accurately painted, are not very sympathetic.

The father is an impossible fake and a bore, the mother is just plain stupid, the daughter is humorless and nagging.

But against this you have the author’s magnificent skill in the construction of scenes like the one in which the daughter is trying to tell her mother that she has that night been deflowered while the mother, reverting to type, is only preoccupied with what she hopes her husband has done to the police. Them dirty rats!

Thanks BigGuy, for the long and thoughtful review. I find I have a different interpretation of the characters than in your statement

"The father is an impossible fake and a bore, the mother is just plain stupid, the daughter is humorless and nagging."

You see I think O'Neill believes the father's unhappiness is caused by his pretentious facade, which separates him from the people around him. And when he gives it up, he is freed to be of the people around him and to love and be loved by them, even changing his political affiliation in the process. He seems to have become a whole man.

I find the mother clings to her faith and that is what keeps her going. Her faith in loyalty to her husband and the choice she has made. She does use a lot of denial to keep going, too.

Rather than being humorless and nagging, I found the daughter, with the impudence of youth, willing to challenge her surroundings and choose her future.

I found Byrne's transformation as the father and the eventual confrontation with his daughter to be the most fascinating part of the play.

Updated On: 12/2/05 at 02:03 PM

Actual, Ms. Bergl as the daughter is supposed to turn her brogue on and off, as that is what is called for in the script. She puts the brogue on at times to annoy her father, who wants her to present herself as being of a more genteel class than the peasant Irish.

Going December 11.