By BEN BRANTLEY

And then all at once there is fire.

The conflagration occurs midway through what until then has been at best a lukewarm revival of Eugene O'Neill's "Touch of the Poet." Much of the cast of the play, which opened last night at Studio 54 in a Roundabout Theater Company production, has appeared to be under the impression that this is a saggy comedy of manners, not a portrait of a family in hell. And the show's ideally cast star, Gabriel Byrne, playing one of O'Neill's self-dramatizing monster fathers, has barely shaken hands with the Olympian contradictions of his character, much less embraced them.
 

Yet as soon as the second half of Doug Hughes's production of this seldom-seen drama begins, you can sense the embers stirring within Mr. Byrne's Cornelius Melody, a grandly deluded Irish innkeeper in early-19th-century Massachusetts. Suddenly, traits that were only sketchily prefigured - Cornelius's raging pride and anger, his capacity to strike out at and cripple anyone who loves him - erupt into a volcanic display that jolts sleepy theatergoers into tense and wide-eyed wakefulness.

Since the moment marks an exciting turning point in Mr. Byrne's performance, though not in the production as a whole, let's dwell on it for a bit. The scene is a dinner party in celebration of the anniversary of the Battle of Talavera, in which Cornelius (known all too fittingly as Con) served as a major in the British army.

His back to the audience, Con is dressed to thrill in his regimental uniform, inspiring whispers among his shabby, drunken dinner guests. "Ain't he a lunatic struttin' around like a play actor in his red coat," says one of them, "lyin' about his battles with the French."

It's an assessment with which the audience might have agreed up to this point. Whether rhapsodizing about his imagined aristocratic lineage and romantic conquests or collapsing into spasms of contrition, Mr. Byrne's alcohol-fueled Con has certainly come across as theatrical, but mostly in a ludicrous way. There has been little of the "formidable and impressive" air of "wrecked distinction" that O'Neill described.

But then Mr. Byrne turns around, and - lo and behold - he is Con in the ravaged, intimidating flesh. "I said less noise, you dogs," he barks. As he recites a verse from his beloved Byron about standing solitary among flatterers, Con reeks of a disgust that encompasses the whole world, including himself. And when he says to the men around him, "So may you go on fooling yourselves that I am fooled in you," he exudes a cracked tragic grandeur that approaches the Shakespearean.

Con the poseur has become the part he plays; so has Mr. Byrne the actor. And the audience has been allowed a rare glimpse of a thrilling process: an actor's taking hold of the reins of a runaway role and riding it for all it's worth. From that point on, Mr. Byrne remains in full gallop. Unfortunately, since no one else in this undercast, underdirected production begins to match his pace, the last line of the aforementioned verse from Byron takes on an unintended appropriateness: "This is to be alone - This, this is solitude!"

First produced on Broadway in 1958, five years after O'Neill's death, "A Touch of the Poet" is the only completed play of a projected cycle called "A Tale of Possessors, Self-Dispossessed," which was to follow the corruption of the American soul by materialism over the centuries. ("More Stately Mansions," left by O'Neill in an inchoate form, is part of the same series.)

There are inklings in "A Touch of the Poet," which O'Neill began in the mid-1930's, of the far-reaching Faustian social bargain he intended to portray, mostly in reference to characters who are never seen onstage. But its fascination lies in its portrait of Con and in its savage family dynamics, which recall those of O'Neill's masterpiece, "Long Day's Journey Into Night." Con, like the mythomaniacal James Tyrone in "Journey," was inspired by O'Neill's father, the swashbuckling actor James O'Neill.

As in "Journey," interfamilial patterns of recrimination and apology, of the conflicting impulses to wound and to heal, assume operatic proportions as Con lashes out at his doggishly devoted, peasant wife, Nora (Dearbhla Molloy), and his rebellious daughter, Sara (Emily Bergl). There are also echoes of "Journey" in the pipe-dream monologues and in dialogue that rings with sadistic thrust and parry. You are reminded that when it comes to inflicting pain in the plays of O'Neill, no one twists the knife more expertly than a blood relative.

Mr. Hughes's production, a much-tightened version of the original script, begins with atmospheric promise. Santo Loquasto's bleak, cavernous set is an appropriate battlefield for O'Neill's titans of domestic discontent. And the opening wail of uilleann pipes, played by David Power, which shifts into swirling music of military glory (by David Van Tieghem), beautifully establishes the central opposition of inner pain and public fantasy.

Yet when the cast members arrive, they seem dwarfed by their surroundings. As the bedraggled Nora, who has been crushed by her love for a man who treats her with contempt, Ms. Molloy seems exceptionally hale and sane, like one of Sean O'Casey's super-colleens. And in the small but crucial role of the deceptive, eccentric Deborah Hartford, the genteel Yankee mother of the man Sara hopes to marry, Kathryn Meisle has the crisply spoken archness of a matron in a Mayfair drawing room.

These incongruities would matter less if the production had a Sara capable of holding her own with Mr. Byrne's Con. A woman of fierce will, intelligence and disdain for Con's lordly affectations, Sara damningly resembles her father in ways she is loath to admit. Yet Ms. Bergl registers mostly as a pouty, petulant and thoroughly contemporary teenager, like one of the supporting babes from "The OC" She's pure no-calorie soda when what's called for is undiluted firewater.

This means that Mr. Byrne has no one to provoke the necessary spiked responses in Con's face-offs with the women in his life. That lack may explain the ungainly tentativeness of his early scenes, in which Con seesaws between barbed hauteur and abject apology. It is not a good sign that the audience chuckles comfortably, instead of uneasily, at each shift in Con's mood.

Mr. Byrne is evidently taking his cue too literally from the script's description of his character: "One soon feels that he is overplaying a role that has become more real than his real self to him." From the beginning, he seems more at ease with the men in the cast, who notably include Byron Jennings (as an old army buddy) and Daniel Stewart Sherman (as the tavern's bartender). When the play moves from exposition to action, after the intermission, Mr. Byrne comes into his own, hitting the notes of agony and ecstatic illusion he sounded so penetratingly in the Broadway revival of "A Moon for the Misbegotten" in 2000.

As enacted by Mr. Byrne, Con's systematic humiliation of Sara as he discusses her matrimonial prospects is so scorching that you feel relieved that you are not in his line of vision. And Con's climactic metamorphosis into the man behind the aristocrat's pose is embodied with shattering, scary violence and precision.

But as glorious as Mr. Byrne is in these scenes, a great Con - or to be exact, half a great Con - does not a great "Poet" make. "What that needs is an actor like Maurice Barrymore or my old man," O'Neill said of the role. "One of those big-chested, chiseled-mug, romantic old boys who could walk onto a stage with all the aplomb and regal splendor with which they walked into the old Hoffman House bar, drunk or sober. Most actors in these times lack an air."

Mr. Byrne is the rare contemporary actor who truly has such qualities. He deserves a production that will allow him to turn that air of splendor into the sustained, gale-force dramatic wind that is obviously within him.