In Eugene O’Neill’s A Touch of the Poet, Cornelius “Con” Melody—with an emphasis on the LO of MeLOdy—is much like the Tyrones in the playwright’s magnificent Long Day’s Journey Into Night. He’s quick to anger, quick to apologize, and even quicker to rage again. (Apparently, that’s how O’Neill saw tyrannical men.)
On the other hand, whereas James Tyrone is celebrated for an acting career that centered around repeatedly playing Edmond Dantes, the Count of Monte Cristo, any fame that Con Melody has accumulated is in his mind.
An Irish émigré, he runs a shabeen just outside of Boston, although he considers it a much grander establishment. Likewise, he considers himself its grand proprietor. Even more so he fancies himself the valiant Major Melody singled out for praise after the 1809 Battle of Talavera by the soon-to-be Duke of Wellington.
For the Irish Repertory Theatre revival of the four-act play (two acts here), Robert Cuccioli is the quizzical blowhard, and his performance is grand, even grander than Con is in his own estimation. It’s another addition to a resumé attesting to Cuccioli’s place as a foremost tragedian.
Con is a big man, or if not, he must carry himself as one. Cuccioli is tree-trunk large. He has—and has since his famed Jekyll & Hyde days —a leading-man’s face and figure. As the commanding O’Neill protagonist into whom he’s transformed himself, he often stands sideways to the audience while Con admires himself in a mirror on a wall of Charlie Corcoran’s evocative shabeen side room.
Assuming the position, Cuccioli gives spectators a good gander at his etched profile and fit body, especially when Con dons a well-preserved military outfit for observing the Talavera Battle anniversary he honors as a reminder of the big man he was that others must bow to as well.
In those moments, he’s remains still. More often, he charges around to assure himself that the Irishman he is is someone of import during a time when signs like “No Irish Need Apply” are commonplace. Succinctly put, he’s suffering from rampant illusions of grandeur. It’s as if Con is infected with those illusions, and Cuccioli performs as if the affliction is propelling him from somewhere deep within. Until, that is, he exhaustively purges the illusions that have not only stricken him but have contagiously affected everyone in the immediate vicinity.
Those nearest on this special day, as every day, are obsequious wife Nora (Kate Forbes) and censorious daughter Sara (Belle Ackroyd). The day is special not only for Con’s Talavera boasting but because upstairs and never seen is Simon Hartford, an upper-class young man, whom Sara has been nursing and with whom she’s fallen in love, her love evidently reciprocated.
O’Neill’s dramatic trajectory is how Con will get through the day, reiterating his exalted sense of himself without ruining Sara’s chances with a Massachusetts scion. It’s especially uncertain when Simon’s mother, Deborah Hartford (Mary McCann), arrives to end the potential union, only to have Con recklessly offend her. Events worsen when Simon’s unseen father sends a lawyer, Nicholas Gadsby (John C. Vennema), to buy off the Melody family.
What agitatedly transpires results in Con’s facing his illusions and, as O’Neill plots it, at last dismisses them. Not necessarily a typical O’Neill denouement. So, forgive a cynical reviewer for wondering how long Con’s off-the-illusions-wagon will last. (How many illusions are put out with the empty bottles at the curtain of The Iceman Cometh?)
Also, forgive a cynical reviewer for pointing out that Con’s jettisoning his illusions about remaining within class barriers means, at least implicitly, he accepts that breaking those unwritten rules is impossible. How relentlessly true was it then?
O’Neill fans are aware that A Touch of the Poet is part of a planned nine-play cycle. (Or is it an 11-play cycle? Reports differ.) Only two are known, this one thought finished, and More Stately Mansions not thought finished. The cycle was to be known as A Tale of Possessors, Self-Possessed, the title a quote from Marlowe by way of Goethe.
But is A Touch of the Poet finished? Had O’Neill the time or the inclination to revise—not always the great playwright’s urge—might he not, for instance, have trimmed much of the opening, in which barman Mike Maloy (James Russell) and Con’s best friend Jamie Cregan (Andy Murray) shoot the breeze with paragraphs of exposition. He might not have erased much of eager drunks Dan Roche (David Beck), Paddy O’Dowd (Rex Young), and Patch Riley (David Sitler), who boisterously remind audiences that, sure and begorrah, Irishmen enjoy their whiskey. Or did in 1828, anyway.
Ciarán O’Reilly directs the production with most of his usual skills intact, although he asks some less-than-helpful lighting changes of designer Michael Gottfried. (Alejo Vietti and Gail Baldoni are the co-costumers.) He guarantees that Forbes is up to Nora’s unceasing humility but doesn’t get enough explosive grit from Ackroyd’s Sara.
Never mind. This is Cuccioli’s show, and he’s 100% proof.
A Touch of the Poet opened March 8, 2022, at the Irish Repertory Theatre and runs through April 17. Tickets and information: irishrep.org
