Cornelius Melody, at the center of Eugene O'Neill's A Touch of the Poet, is often cited by scholars as a test run for the role of James Tyrone in the dramatist's Long Day's Journey Into Night. O'Neill projected Poet to be the fifth of an 11-play, multicentury cycle tracing five generations of an Irish family. It is one of only two cycle plays he completed, along with More Stately Mansions.
Like Tyrone, Melody is complex, bedeviling — which is why O'Neill wrote Poet over eight years, creating The Iceman Cometh, Hughie, Long Day's Journey Into Night, and A Moon for the Misbegotten in between. If Doug Hughes' production is oddly uneven, it helps to understand Melody's antecedents while watching the charismatic Gabriel Byrne, back on Broadway for the first time since A Moon for the Misbegotten in 2000, as Melody.
In 1828 near Boston, Melody is the immigrant son of a saloonkeeper who achieved social prominence in Ireland. In the Napoleonic wars, Melody served under the legendary Duke of Wellington. Had a sexual indiscretion not forced his expulsion, sullying his reputation, Melody's valor at the storied Battle of Talavera would be unstained.
But it was stained and, 20 years later, his surroundings — set and costume designer Santo Loquasto's shabby tavern — yield clues to how far he's fallen: the gray color scheme; his peasant wife, Nora (Dearbhla Molloy), benumbed to his drinking; his daughter Sara (Emily Bergl), sent to finishing school to lose her brogue and now disgusted by her father's grandiose delusions and long-gone fortune.
Unseen is Simon Harford, the Yankee scion who has taken ill, taken a room, and taken an interest in Sara, who returns his love, plenty of poesy composed between them. When Melody — whose face, O'Neill wrote, is like "an embittered Byronic hero" — unknowingly meets Simon's mother, Deborah (the luminous Kathryn Meisle), he thinks his charms are intact, that she'll sniff his wealth despite his poverty. "I'll wager my all against a penny that even among the fish-blooded Yankees there's not a man whose heart doesn't catch flame from your beauty!" he brags. "Is this — what the Irish call blarney?" she replies. Melody is all blarney, and as O'Neill has it, the curse of self-realization means self-destruction.
Earlier, Byrne's confrontational scenes with Bergl are all about the play's florid language — the two-word insults ("bogtrotting peasant"), the whimpering apologies, the portrait of a man with a hollowed-out core. When the Harfords' attorney, Nicholas Gadsby (the blithe John Horton), offers money to stop the union of Sara and Simon, Melody, clad in his resplendent major's uniform, cracks, and out come all O'Neill's themes — the Irish immigrant's inferiority, the drinking curse, the delusions of grandeur — until Melody, near suicidal, speaks again in a brogue, thick as soup. And Byrne gives a Learlike performance as a man unable to weather such a thunderous storm.
The production is uneven because the other performances fall short of Byrne's. For example, subplots involving the men who frequent the tavern — played by Daniel Stewart Sherman, Ciaran O'Reilly, and Randall Newsome, and particularly Byron Jennings' Jamie Cregan, whose character has a special tie to Melody — have little urgency; the accents seem mighty thick. Molloy's Nora beckons our empathy, but her pivotal moments come opposite Sara, and Bergl is grotesquely modernistic in her acting — that flouncy walk, those clipped cadences. Hughes stages the play precisely, but this is ultimately Byrne's show. Fortunately, his Melody is an extraordinary tune.
Presented by Roundabout Theatre Company at Studio 54, 254 W. 54th St., NYC. Dec. 8-Jan. 29. Tue.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Wed., Sat., and Sun., 2 p.m. (212) 719-1300. Casting by Jim Carnahan, CSA