A TOUCH OF THE POET. There's something poignant about A Touch of the Poet being the first Eugene O'Neill play to reach Broadway after the death of August Wilson on October 2, 2005. O'Neill envisioned A Touch of the Poet (finished in 1942) as part of a vast American history cycle that he never finished; Wilson, in a way, took on the O'Neillian task and managed to complete an entire ten-play cycle.

In some respects, Wilson's cycle couldn't sound farther removed from O'Neill's play. The former follows African Americans over the course of the twentieth century. The latter revolves around an Irish American immigrant family living outside on the outskirts of Boston in 1828. (The father and mother both live under the spell of past glories while the daughter seeks a new life free from their fantasies.) Yet theatergoers familiar with the character of Wilson's work may be struck at how the current Roundabout production of A Touch of the Poet bears a family resemblance to many of Wilson's plays. Elements such as folk music and themes of ambition, identity, and conflicts between classes, cultures, and generations are all significant forces in the O'Neill's Irish American drama as well as Wilson's African American cycle. Surely that says something about what both playwrights thought of their country.

As for this particular production, it is filled with beauteous moments in which O'Neill's lines resonate with Shakespearean (or perhaps Byronic) lyricism. There are also, intermittently, less rapturous stretches where the characters' interactions seem slightly lacking in intimacy.

Indeed, the drama seems to lack a certain rollicking momentum. O'Neill, son of one of the most popular melodramatic actors of his time, wrote that central character Major Cornelius Melody (a 1942 pun if there ever was one) should be played by "an actor like Maurice Barrymore or my old man." As quoted in Arthur and Barbara Gelb's O'Neill, the playwright pictured "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." This production's Major Melody, Gabriel Byrne, is probably not the larger-than-life thespian O'Neill envisioned.

Byrne plays Melody intriguingly, as a fragile figure barely maintaining his grasp on his pretensions. It's a fair interpretation with revelations of its own, but the absence of a bigger blowhard in the role (think Brian Dennehy or Philip Bosco) seems to take some of the air out of the work as a whole. Still, the general high quality of the production and the beauty and cleverness of O'Neill's playwrighting (the drama anticipates The Iceman Cometh) make this production worth consideration.

A Touch of the Poet is playing at Studio 54, which recently installed relatively conventional seating in the front rows. Discount tickets have been available through TKTS, Playbill.com, and TheaterMania.com. I suspect that the nosebleed seats might be too far away, but most other seats (especially those to audience left) should be fine.