A Village Voice reporter last fall quoted me as saying that Goodman Theatre artistic director Robert Falls “talks a great show….But it’s backfired on him because he can fail to deliver.” What he left out was the context of my criticism: Like any artist Falls can fail, but when he does deliver, his productions are revelatory. Like Rat in the Skull, starring Brian Dennehy, at Wisdom Bridge more than a decade ago. Like The Night of the Iguana at Goodman in 1994. Like Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh at the Goodman, starring Dennehy, in 1990. And like this month’s Falls-Dennehy rematch, O’Neill’s A Touch of the Poet. Staged with a notable absence of technical gimmickry, the better to focus the audience’s attention on the language and the director’s attention on the acting, this full-blooded revival vigorously embraces O’Neill’s raw juxtapositions–of naturalism and expressionism, of historical melodrama and mythic tragedy, of fictional invention and autobiographical confession, of despairing bleakness, outrageous comedy, and heroic lyricism. These are what make O’Neill so important (if often unacknowledged) an influence on contemporary “masters,” who mostly pale by comparison.
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Written from 1935 to 1942, around the same time as Iceman and Long Day’s Journey Into Night, this lesser-known but by no means lesser drama explores many of the same themes. It’s the only completed portion of an 11-play cycle, “A Tale of Possessors, Self-Dispossessed,” in which O’Neill intended to dramatize the spiritual failure of successive generations of an American family torn between idealistic aspiration and grasping materialism. O’Neill destroyed his drafts of the other plays (except for More Stately Mansions, the unfinished sequel to A Touch of the Poet), but perhaps completed this one because it struck closer to home. Though most of the cycle was meant to focus on the English-descended Harford dynasty, A Touch of the Poet centers on an Irish immigrant clearly inspired by O’Neill’s blustering, tippling actor-father, James O’Neill. And though it’s set in 1828–it includes references to the Napoleonic wars, Lord Byron, and Andrew Jackson–the play draws from the same bottomless well of psychic blood as Long Day’s Journey. (The Cambridge Guide to Theatre rightly describes O’Neill as “an emotional hemophiliac.”)
O’Neill unabashedly emulates Greek tragedy in several ways.
The production’s one weakness is Jenny Bacon’s Sara. Relying on a more internal style of acting than the seasoned Dennehy and Payton-Wright, Bacon too often swallows her lines; while I believed in what she was feeling, I had trouble hearing what she was saying. (In her defense, she reportedly had a cold.) More crucial, she doesn’t emerge as the mirror image of Con that I think O’Neill intended, the way that Colleen Crimmins’s fiery Sara did so brilliantly in Commons Theatre’s production ten years ago. A Touch of the Poet is a portrait of father and daughter–parent and child–locked in a struggle O’Neill knew all too well: prideful, foolish, impetuous, and tragically heroic despite the horrible wrong both parties do each other, their loved ones, and themselves.
