TT: Touched with fire

I review two off-Broadway plays in today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, Friendly Fire’s revival of Eugene O’Neill’s A Touch of the Poet and the Playwrights Horizons premiere of Craig Lucas’ Prayer for My Enemy. The first is masterly, the second awful. Here’s an excerpt.
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Eugene O’Neill is the most frustrating of major playwrights, for his output was so uneven and his craft so unsure that even the best of his plays can be made to look amateurish by a weak staging. I was fooled, for instance, by the Roundabout Theatre Company’s 2005 revival of “A Touch of the Poet,” which was so far off the mark that I mistakenly thought the play itself was at fault. Unlike that over-fancy production, Friendly Fire’s Off-Broadway staging is a bargain-basement affair acted on the plainest of sets by a cast consisting mostly of near-unknowns–but it packs the punch of a bullet in the belly.
Daniel J. Travanti, to be sure, isn’t exactly unknown: He was the star of “Hill Street Blues,” one of the most admired TV series of the ’80s. My guess, though, is that his name will be unfamiliar to younger readers, since he’s spent the past couple of decades working in regional theater and appearing in forgettable made-for-TV movies. His 2007 Off-Broadway performance in Oren Safdie’s “The Last Word…” was the first time he’d acted on a New York stage, and this is the second. Yet Mr. Travanti is galvanically powerful as Con Melody, a drunken tavernkeeper who once was an officer and a gentleman and hates the lesser man he has become. On paper Mr. Travanti is miscast–he’s 68, nearly a quarter-century older than the character he’s playing–and his ferocious performance is devoid of the decayed Irish charm that O’Neill seems to have had in mind. Instead he gives us an angry failure who is teetering on the far edge of madness, an interpretation that may well be “wrong” (whatever that means) but is still tremendously exciting. If Con had lived as long as Mr. Travanti, I feel sure that this is what he would have become….
Craig Lucas has written good plays–I very much liked “Small Tragedy”–but “Prayer for My Enemy” is a mess, a mishmash of mawkish clichés that tries frantically to sound profound.
In order of appearance, Mr. Lucas gives us:
• Billy, who joined the Army to prove that he was a real man. Yes, he got sent to Iraq. Yes, he got wounded there. Yes, he’s against the war (“It’s bad because it was bad before we got there and now it’s bad in a new way”). Yes, he’s gay. Yes, he’s in denial about it.
• Tad, a bisexual slacker who slept with Billy in high school and wants to do it again.
• Dolores, a motor-mouthed neurotic.
• Marianne, Billy’s unhappy older sister, whom Tad impregnates and marries even though he still has the hots for Billy. Yes, she’s been divorced. Yes, she has a child by her first husband. Yes, her son is autistic….
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Read the whole thing here.