Brian Dennehy

Brian Dennehy as Cornelius "Con" Melody with Deanna Dunagan as
Deborah Harford in the 1996 production of A Touch of the Poet.
Photo by Eric Y. Exit.

And what happens is, he comes in having sustained this beating, and he becomes that person, and of course it panics her and her mother because they’ve grown to love, of course, and been able to live with and be with the poser, the fake. Now that he becomes the person that everybody says he was—nobody likes that. Anyway, O’Neill’s point was that you get up in the morning, and you put on your character like you put on your clothes. “This is who I am, and I’ve got to be this person because I sure as hell can’t be the real person that exists inside.” How do you get through the day that way? The only way to live our lives—and I suspect that he’s right about this, I mean this is what psychiatry is all about, that’s what mood elevating drugs are all about—this allows you to get through the day. Why? Because it’s so damn difficult: the necessity of getting through the day as who we really are. Well, that’s what O’Neill said over and over and over again, but he makes that point. And I suspect he’s probably right. The fact is, you’re job as an actor is to do both of those things—this is the character that the character is pretending to be and somewhere there inside is the other character, the real character—you want the audience to see that too, but to know that at the same time the character is trying to conceal that person. Now is that a difficult job? Damn right it is. But it’s what makes it all worthwhile.

Moderator: I want to open it up to questions.

Audience: One question. Some O’Neill scholars will probably shoot me for saying this, but have you looked at More Stately Mansions?

Dennehy: Well, all 265 pages? For those of you who are not familiar, he wrote…he was gonna write this cycle of plays which would cover the entire American experience—I don’t want to bog down in a bunch of detail—but, anyway, More Stately Mansions was part of that. Recently—it’s only within the last 5 or 6 years, right?—that they found the entire, they thought it had been destroyed. There’s a shorter version of it that existed that was only 3 hours long; they did, however, find, they are constantly finding new stuff, and they found the entire play. What happened was, he and Carlotta were staying at a hotel in Boston. He was, he knew, getting ready to die. They had been recently brought back together again because she tried to kill him in Marblehead, Massachusetts. She threw him out of the house on a freezing night. He fell, and he was on the front door step, and they had a Japanese or Chinese houseboy who called the cops. It was wintertime in Marblehead. There aren’t many cops around, then. And they came and put him in the hospital, he wound up in a hospital in New York, and he prevailed upon his friends to get him back together with Carlotta, because he knew he was dying.