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Dennehy duo
Trinity pairs O’Neill with O’Casey
BY CAROLYN CLAY
Hughie & A Pound on Demand
By Eugene O’Neill (Hughie) and Sean O’Casey (A Pound on Demand). Directed by Catherine Baker Steindler. Set by Eugene Lee. Costumes by William Lane. Lighting by Edward Pierce. Sound by Richard Woodbury. With Brian Dennehy, Joe Grifasi, Ginger Eckert, Cynthia Strickland, and William Damkoehler. At Trinity Repertory Company through April 4.


If Eugene O’Neill’s Hughie is a doodle by a giant, then Sean O’Casey’s A Pound on Demand, with which O’Neill’s play shares a bill at Trinity Rep, is a doodle-by-the-numbers. The primary raison d’être for the evening is Brian Dennehy, and the two-time Tony winner, powerful yet likable and capable of surprising delicacy, is reason enough for most anything. But Dennehy gives a weary, subtle performance in Hughie. And the pairing of the plays seems random. O’Neill’s 1928-set character sketch unfolds in a seedy Manhattan hotel where a Broadway gambler as rusty as his lingo mourns one dead night clerk while trying to seduce another. O’Casey’s boozy bit of blarney is set in a rural Irish post office serving as a sort of 1930s ATM. A whiff of whiskey and some frayed posturing are all the short plays have in common, unless you want to stretch things to suggest that one’s a yarn spun, the other an illustration of how necessary is the spinning.

You could call Hughie an O’Neill play in miniature. Like Jim Tyrone of A Moon for the Misbegotten and the drunks of The Iceman Cometh, swirling pipe dreams around in their alcohol like little umbrellas, the lonely, rootless, swaggering Erie mainlines his saving illusions — except that the needle keeps falling out of his arm, leaving him bereft and very close to looking hard in a mirror. The piece, the only completed one in a planned series called By Way of Obit, was not performed during the playwright’s lifetime, though alpha O’Neill actor Jason Robards later made it his own. And compared with its behemoth relatives, Hughie is small if artful pickings.

At Trinity, the stars of the evening are Dennehy and the designers. The brilliant, era-mining Eugene Lee, using the same scenic bricks and mortar, pulls off a Trading Spaces–worthy transition from O’Casey’s backwater post office, with an Éamonn de Valera poster on the bulletin board, to the decaying midtown Manhattan hotel of Hughie, where Erie has hung his hat since better days of betting on the "bangtails" and shooting craps. As Erie, dwarfed by the infrastructure of the city, plods home after a five-day drunk triggered by the funeral of the eponymous night clerk whose attention lent credence to his self-delusion, an elevated train thunders overhead. Despite the large mahogany desk behind which the new clerk vegetates and a glimpse of linen in an off-stage dining room, the place gives off a down-at-the-heels aura, from soiled walls to broken clock. And Erie, when he wheels into view in once-dapper seersucker and a panama hat, wears a vest with one missing button. But in Dennehy’s performance, in Trinity’s intimate downstairs theater, these details say less about the fortunes of the self-proclaimed Broadway sport than his lumbering sag and bleak blue eyes do.

Still, this is not a bravura performance. Erie — unlike the charismatic if defeated Willie Loman of Death of a Salesman and the theatrical James Tyrone of Long Day’s Journey into Night (for which roles Dennehy won Tonys) — is a big-talking small-timer, and the actor plays him that way. Robards’s more compelling Erie (which turn he brought to Trinity in 1993) was a bantam rooster with broken wings. Dennehy, 65, adds a decade to O’Neill’s 45-year-old habitué of the racetrack and the rackets. The showboating of earlier days, when Erie regaled the deceased Hughie with boasts of his gambling and sexual derring-do, has taken on water. This Erie still exudes an ironic touch of the old razzle-dazzle, performing a half-hearted vaudeville shimmy with his big hands, and he rises, when the clerk’s apathy shows like a floozy’s slip, to a sardonic bark. But despite the 11th-hour rally, when Erie brings the clerk out of his coma long enough to get the old sucker-landing bravado back, Dennehy’s loser, sentimental and depressive, is a guy who’s long bid the pipe dream goodbye.

The actor gives a livelier performance in the negligible A Pound on Demand, as a sod-caked Irishman too drunk to stand, much less stand on the ceremony of signing one’s name to a form in order to be advanced the currency of the title. Long-time Dennehy compatriot Joe Grifasi, the deferentially dreaming night clerk of Hughie, is the nimbler half of the pair o’ drunks looking for that pound in order to carry on the liver-destroying activities of the day. In the 30-minute display of rubber-legged determination and failure (so obscure, the play doesn’t even get a mention in O’Casey’s phone-book-size Autobiographies), the two do boozy battle with objects animate, ranging from a regulation-obsessed postmistress to an old bat in tweeds, and inanimate, including a couple of swinging doors and a pen. What the Porter scene is to Macbeth, this might be to The Plough and the Stars.


Issue Date: March 5 - 11, 2004
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