AN INTERVIEW WITH BRIAN DENNEHY

Arguably the nation's foremost interpreter of the work of O'Neill, actor Brian Dennehy sat down after a long day of tech rehearsal for Hughie to discuss the playwright's work with Steve Scarpa, Long Wharf Theatre's public relations manager.

Steve Scarpa: You have a rich history with O'Neill's plays, including your Tony Award-winning performance in 2003 of Long Day's Journey Into Night. How does your work on Hughie compare with these other experiences?

Brian Dennehy: Hughie is a distillation of everything O'Neill had been writing up till then. It's about the necessity for illusion and self-delusion and whatever props you can use to convince yourself, however superficial they may be, that your life has some meaning.

Hughie is the essence of the plays A Touch of the Poet and Iceman Cometh, which is a play about rationale, rationalizing one's behavior. That's what Hughie is, except it is 45 minutes and not five hours long.

Again, it's one of the character studies O'Neill wrote - there are about eight or nine of them - which were essentially one-character plays or a small group of actors and then were all about an amalgamation of people he knew.

Playing any O'Neill character requires a constant immersion in the character; in order to get it right it needs to be done again and again and again. It's never boring. It never gets repetitive. It never gets uninteresting, because O'Neill made them so complicated.

The challenge in O'Neill's philosophical plays is to make the character, if not sympathetic, then understandable - and then hopefully sympathetic as well.

The audience starts out really disliking Erie. He's a blowhard, a loudmouth, and he boasts of his imaginary success. If he was such a success what the hell is he doing in this rathole hotel?

But by the end of it you realize all he's ever really had is this sense of self. Of course, O'Neill is convinced that's all you ever really had in your life is a sense of self, real or imaginary. As far as O'Neill's concerned it is all imaginary.

O'Neill never enjoyed a minute of his success, although he was a healthy narcissist and he liked making money and he liked spending money. He also knew essentially way down deep inside of himself that it was all a pose, in his case a successful pose, but it was a pose nonetheless.

That is where he explored throughout his life's work, that disconnect . . . for example, his work about his father, who was a very successful actor and yet was bitterly unhappy. O'Neill captured that in Long Day's Journey Into Night. In all four of the characters there is a sense of frustration, of not making their lives work.

The character of Erie Smith in Hughie is the pure, distilled essence of that philosophy.

SS: Do you learn something more about the character each time you play him?

BD: Oh yeah. We worked on it four years ago and you'd be astonished at how much it has changed, how much it has grown. I can feel it myself. It is a different play. It is a different production from even this summer.

SS: Could you describe your collaboration with director Robert Falls?

BD: Well, Bob and I have done a lot of stuff together. In almost every case, Bob has a very strong sense of what he thinks the play is about. I have a very strong sense of what I think the play is about.

Usually they match or one can be easily converted to the other. Sometimes they don't, sometimes there is a lot of fighting about it. Certainly Bob and I have agreed more than we've disagreed and we've both worked hard at O'Neill, trying to understand.

O'Neill, unlike most playwrights, didn't see it as his responsibility to make it easy for the actor or director. His language is turgid and complicated and there are endless qualifying phrases, explanations, detours within the sentences themselves - very tough stuff to make alive and real, but it can be done.

He said what he wanted to say in the way he wanted to say it. He did some rewriting, but there wasn't much of a case of him rewriting a scene to make it easier for an actor or a director to stage it.

Towards the end of his life, he instructed his estate that his plays - especially Long Day's Journey - were not to be ever produced. It could only be read. Gratefully, his wife Carlotta ignored that. Interestingly, the publisher at Random House fought her on that. He said, his intentions were that it never be produced and that we should follow these wishes. The publisher was wrong.

The reason he had this very strict rule against productions was that he didn't have any confidence in directors or actors to do what he wanted.

After a production of Iceman Cometh in 1945 in New York, which was not well done, directed by the wrong person, he began sending copies of his scripts to the critics before they saw a show on opening night to make sure that they understood what the play was about.

I am sure (Carlotta) wanted the play heard and seen and she trusted Jose Quintero. Shortly after Eugene died, Jose had done a hugely successful production of Iceman Cometh, the first revival with Jason Robards. It wasn't just a critical success, it was a commercial success too, even though it played off-Broadway, and it made Jason a star. More importantly she realized it could be done, that there was someone out there who could do his work.

SS: Are there influences you are calling on in playing Erie Smith, people you are calling on, life experiences that lead you to this very particular man?

BD: Not so much with Erie, but certainly that was the case with James Tyrone (in Long Day's Journey Into Night). There was much of my grandfather in James Tyrone.

It's funny, Jose Quintero, when asked by Frederic March how he saw it, he said, "I see him like my uncle, a Panamanian diplomat. Successful, smooth and sophisticated." When I started working on that part, I didn't see that.

I had done so much research. The boys consistently referred to the old man as the peasant, the Irish peasant. O'Neill was furious with him because of his cheapness and the clothes he wore when he went out and worked in the garden, and so forth. He'd put a handkerchief on his head, just like an Irish peasant would do.

So when I read all of that, it became clear to me that far from being a Panamanian diplomat, he was an Irish peasant. He was smart, he knew what to do on stage, which was different from himself. But when he was being himself, which he is being himself in Long Day's Journey, he becomes that other person. And that's the way I played him. I played him like my grandfather.

I see Erie as all these street guys you've ever known, who've got to hustle. Erie is a less smart, less successful version of Jimmy Cagney and he has a patter, a routine. O'Neill describes him as a teller of tales. Cause he's good at that. He's good at telling stories, he's funny, he enjoys his own stories - nobody else really does.

He has the same kind of raffish quality without the grace Cagney had. Certainly without the success. He is like one of the Dead End Kids, like Gabe Dell. A guy who always thinks he is bigger and smarter and more successful than he really is.

There is very something pathetic about it. The audience sees it. And yet in the end they realize, despite all of that, despite all of that bullshit, he's just like us. He's just like you and me. He has the same sadness, has the same loneliness, and the same sense of loss.

He probably needed Hughie more than Hughie needed him. They both needed each other - they both agreed to support each other in their illusions, which is the critical point where O'Neill is concerned, the critical act of love and support, saying I'll accept your bullshit if you accept mine.