Dream Addict

By T.E.Kalem

A TOUCH OF THE POET by Eugene O'Neill

O'Neill's magnificent obsession was that a life of illusions is unpardonable but that a life without illusions is unbearable. This produces the fierce tension at the heart of his dramatic imagination.

In A Touch of the Poet, as elsewhere, O'Neill dramatizes, in the agitated course of a single day, the downward course of a lifetime. He tells of a man whose life would crumble except for his dreams and whose dreams themselves fall apart at last. And, as so often in O'Neill, Poet has centripetal force and centrifugal wastefulness, giant strength and giant sprawl, sure theatrical instincts and shaky dramatic structure. The present revival at Broadway's Helen Hayes Theater is like a tidal wave that seems to purge almost every defect of the play.

The setting is a tavern near Boston. The time is 1828. The hero is an O'Neill staple, the man of illusions-cum-sorrows, bottle-fed. With the aid of drink, Con Melody (Jason Robards) cultivates a highly colored remembrance of things past--the Gaelic gallant seducing the lovelies of Europe, the fearless cavalry major decorated on a Spanish field of honor by the great Wellington himself. In sorry reality, he is an impoverished tavern keeper too proud to tend bar as his father did in Ireland. Indeed, pride hagrides Con Melody, like the Greek Furies, except that he is driven more toward travesty than tragedy.

In his scarlet dragoon's uniform, he preens before a mirror and loftily mouths stanzas from Byron. Playing the highborn gentleman, though fooling no one, Con charges over the countryside on a thoroughbred mare while reducing his daughter to a barroom slavey. He sneers at the Yankees as vulgar traders while owing them money and enjoying none of their trade.

His fiery daughter Sara (Kathryn Walker) has a wealthy young Yankee in tow, and when it comes out that the boy's father wants no truck with the peat-bog Melodys, Con rides swaggeringly forth to avenge such an insult by issuing a dueling challenge. Terribly beaten by the police, Con stumbles home in a state of catatonic silence, all the posturing and pride of him. This time he goes forth only to kill the last emblem of his dream, his blooded mare, his Byronic self.

As confirmed a dream addict as any of the tosspots in The Iceman Cometh, Con Melody is unlike them in having a family around him--a low-born wife Nora (Geraldine Fitzgerald), who unfalteringly loves him, his mettlesome daughter Sara, who is increasingly roused to hate. Yet each inspires in him only a more desolating sense of aloneness. In the costly family game of lies and consequences, Con bears more than a few resemblances to O'Casey's Paycock.

And a few, as well, to James Tyrone, the actor-patriarch of Long Day's Journey into Night, whom O'Neill modeled on his own father. Con dwells on Wellington's praise of his combat heroics as Tyrone dwells on Edwin Booth's praise of his acting. Both men are united in a fear of the poverty of Ireland and a desire to conceal their peasant origins. Both loathe the modern currents of their times. Melody despises the Jacksonian rabble just as Tyrone reviles such (to him) modern playwrights as Strindberg and Ibsen.

An actor must be steeped in O'Neill to draw out the full resonances in the character of Con Melody. For over two decades, Jason Robards has displayed a symbiotic rapport with this great and haunted playwright. Director Jose Quintero's affinity is no less close. The pair seem attuned not only to O'Neill's text but also to his troubled soul. To the role of Con Melody, Robards brings the deepset, brooding eyes of profound melancholy, the harsh self-lacerating laugh that masks inner pain, the actorish stance of assuming, while mocking, the grand manner, the human love that becomes inhuman cruelty under the distillation of alcohol. This is a performance that will go into the record books of acting.

The rest of the cast is undauntably fine. There is a quietly moving tenacity by which Geraldine Fitzgerald transforms Nora's love for her husband into a shining blade of courage. As the daughter Sara, Kathryn Walker beautifully balances an audacity of spirit with an awakening of sensual desire. She has a shatteringly powerful scene in which she goes up the stairs to claim by seduction the man she has lost in aborted courtship and later comes back down glowing in a bodily halo of fulfilled love. Like a gift of grace, all of the actors bring to this play what it sometimes lacks--the multipowered intensity of cumulative passion.

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