A Touch of the Post

"With my present training," Eugene O'Neill once wrote to Harvard's professor of drama George Baker, "I might hope to become a mediocre journey-man playwright. It is just because I do not wish to be one, because I want to be an artist or nothing, that I am writing to you."

"Will the Harvard regulations regarding special students permit my taking your courses--and whatever supplementary ones you would be kind enough to suggest as likely to help me? And if so may I have your permission to enter your course?"

The suppliant did come to Harvard, and fifty years after he wrote this letter he is back in Boston with A Touch of the Poet at the Charles Play-house. Although Poet so dissatisfied O'Neill during his lifetime that he did not publish it, the Charles has done a magnificent job of minimizing its problems, and of bringing the great artistry that the play does possess to life.

The story tells of a day in the life of Major Cornelius Melody (Ret.), the son of an Irish inn-keeper who once fought bravely under Wellington at the Battle of Talavera. When Melody emigrated, he brought with him the myth that he had formerly been a land-holding aristocrat, now reduced by circumstance to keeping a tavern in America.

Despite the rough realities of American life in the 1820s, Con Melody lives completely within his genteel fantasy. He despises the local villagers. He believes himself a Byron, standing in the crowd but not of it, and he often strikes an absurd pose before the mirror to recite the poet's lines, reflecting vainly on his lost aristocratic past.

But his pretensions keep his wife Nora and his ambitious daughter Sara in poverty. Melody will not tend bar--he has hired a barkeep. His daughter must wait on table while he drinks away the meager profits, and he keeps the establishment in debt through the extravagant upkeep of his greatest joy, a white thoroughbred mare.

The play opens with Sara scheming to marry a young American aristocrat who is sick in bed at the inn. Sara is nursing him back to health. She hates her father because she is convinced his wastefulness prevents her from rising in the world. She hopes marriage to the young gentleman will free her from the poverty of her wretched life.

Nora, on the other hand, loves all her husband's fantasies. But he is repelled by her because her peasant brogue and stooped figure recall his unaristocratic marriage.

These are the tensions O'Neill manipulates to bring the hour when Melody can no longer maintain the fiction he has lived. He admits to being the humble son of an innkeeper, and his whole prideful fiction, on which even Sara secretly depended, is shattered.

The plot of Poet centers around Sara's schemes for marriage. It is an involved plot, and the tedious verbal explanations it requires account for much of the play's weakness. Because we never see the young gentleman, a good deal of important off-stage action must be explained.

The complexity of the scheming also makes Sara's lines uncomfortably long, particularly in the second act. Director Michael Murray has contrived to have Sara (Jane Alexander) speak the difficult passages very rapidly. But the rapidity is unnatural, although the plot requires that the lines not be cut. Still Murray has done what he can.

The greatest difficulty in the play stems from the character of Con Melody. Partly because his pretensions are humorous, they must be portrayed as a somewhat deliberate pose. Melody, for all his perseverance, is putting it on. But deliberate pretensions cannot be ripped off with the same agonizing slowness as more unconscious fantasies. Thus the denouement in Poet is an obvious one, and it takes place in a disappointingly short time.

In The Iceman Comets, O'Neill was also working with characters who had deliberate pretensions, but because there were more characters, he was able to sustain the agony. In Long Day's Journey Into Night there are roughly the same number of principals as in Poet, but their deceptions are much more important to them. Being forced to the truth is a more searing process. In Poet O'Neill was caught in between.

Yet the Charles has done beautiful things with the great possibilities for humor and anguish that do exist in Poet. Leigh Warton is superb as Cornelius Melody--the role brings out the qualities in any versatile actor. Katherine Squire plays his wife Nora with a simplicity that suggests deep understanding of her role. As Sara, Miss Alexander has the most demanding job, and particularly in the third act she is wonderful. But her accent is too American--it lies nowhere between her father's aristocratic tone and her mother's brogue--and some of her movements are not fitting. The way she snaps her fingers when she remembers something in the second act, for example is reminiscent of gestures more appropriate to the Hayes-Bick.

The great thing that the resident actors at the Charles have done with Poet is to bring out the O'Neill form the difficulties of a misshapen form he had discarded. Because some passages jar, the organic structure of O'Neill tragedy--even when it is concealed by comedy--becomes more visible. Seeing Poet is like discovering that a girl is beautiful when what made you look again was an ink-smudge on her face.