A Touch of the Poet
Opening Night: December 8, 2005
Closing: January 29, 2006
Theater: Studio 54
Gabriel Byrne stars in Eugene O’Neill’s 1958 play, set in a shabby tavern outside Boston in 1828. The show centers on an Irish immigrant who fancies himself a distinguished gentleman, despite all evidence to the contrary. Down-on-his-luck, he finds himself in a quandary when his daughter falls for the son of a wealthy American, and he insists on maintaining his European gentility.
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December 9, 2005
And then all at once there is fire. The conflagration occurs midway through what until then has been at best a lukewarm revival of Eugene O’Neill’s "Touch of the Poet." Much of the cast of the play, which opened last night at Studio 54 in a Roundabout Theater Company production, has appeared to be under the impression that this is a saggy comedy of manners, not a portrait of a family in hell. And the show’s ideally cast star, Gabriel Byrne, playing one of O’Neill’s self-dramatizing monster fathers, has barely shaken hands with the Olympian contradictions of his character, much less embraced them.
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