The Theater: New Play in Manhattan, Oct. 13, 1958

A Touch of the Poet is one of the two plays in Eugene O’Neill’s projected eleven-play cycle that were not torn up. Originally intended to introduce the whole family chronicle, Poet takes place in 1828 in a tavern near Boston. Here, as elsewhere, O’Neill dramatizes in the agitated course of a day the downward course of a lifetime. As elsewhere too, O’Neill tells of one whose life would crumble but 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 wavering dramatic imagination.

O’Neill’s hero is Con Melody, an Irish officer of peasant birth who served under Wellington in the Peninsular War and is now an impoverished innkeeper and his own taproom’s steadiest customer. Under the influence of booze and Byronism, he lives inside a gilded dream, that fools no one, of being a fine-born gentleman. He rides a thoroughbred mare while making his daughter a slavey; he sneers at the Yankees as vulgar traders while owing them money and enjoying none of their trade. His fiery daughter Sara, has a wellborn young American 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 with a challenge, only to stumble blankly home, all the posturing and pride crushed out of him, to kill that last emblem of his dream, his blooded mare.As confirmed a dream addict as any tosspot or down-and-outer in O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, Con Melody stands apart from them in having a family around him—a lowborn wife who has never ceased to love him, a high-mettled daughter increasingly roused to hate. In the costly game of lies-and-consequences, Con is less like any one in O’Neill than like O’Casey’s Paycock. The consequences are not the same: where at last the Paycock lies sodden among a ruined family, Con, among a rising one, is both broken and reborn—enough Americanized to raise a glass to the plebeian Andrew Jackson. In both plays the character is superior to the action: where in Juno and the Paycock there is too much contrived melodrama for inevitable tragedy, in Poet there is too much lurking farce for great drama. In its half-dozen best scenes, A Touch of the Poet has a tense, grandly flaring quality of theater. But there are not only letdowns of both flatness and verbosity; there is never the squared, cubed, nth-powered intensity of cumulative drama.

Yet, however uneven and overlong, A Touch of the Poet has impact in a theater whose playwrights generally stand far closer to Con Melody than to O’Neill, in gaudily yet transparently trying to pass for what they are not. O’Neill’s stubborn force and burdened, honest feeling help light the way of American drama even when he himself is losing it. And the production, as directed by Harold Clurman, sheds helpful light as well. Eric Portman’s Con is often unintelligible, but it conveys a dynamic power of acting, a demonic possession of the role; and Kim Stanley as Sara shows something of the same fierce stir and brawl. In the role of Con’s wife, which O’Neill sentimentalizes a little, Helen Hayes provides a needed counter-effect—a muted violin against the snarl of brass.