‘Walking With Ghosts’: Actor recalls his past

‘WALKING WITH GHOSTS’: Gabriel Byrne. Photo: Emilio Madrid.

WALKING WITH GHOSTS
Written by Gabriel Byrne
Directed by Lonny Price
Through December 30, 2022
Music Box Theatre
239 West 45th Street
(212-719-6200), www.GabrielByrneOnBroadway.com

By David NouNou

Walking With Ghosts is an honest attempt by Irish actor Gabriel Byrne to stage and perform a one-man monologue about his childhood and part of his adulthood in Dublin. Mr. Byrne starts from the day he was born by being yanked out of his mother’s womb, and the struggles she had getting him out, and his shabby and drab surroundings growing up. I couldn’t help but think of the scene in Auntie Mame, when Mame Dennis, writing her autobiography and collaborating with her Irish ghostwriter, Brian O’Bannion, regarding her birth and childhood, pens the confusing opener to her memoir: “Like an echo from the caves of Coccamaura, I came forth while Deirdre wept cool tears.” Definition: simply put “on the day I was born, it rained.”  It continues, “How bleak was my puberty in Buffalo.”  All I could think of was how dreary was Mr. Byrne’s puberty in Dublin?

It is not easy writing a compelling two-hour and 30-minute monologue about all the ghosts from his childhood and the past, starting with his parents, siblings, childhood friends, happy moments with grandma going to the cinema, colorful neighbors and drunkards, good and often spiteful teachers; and ultimately the “Catholic priest.” I needn’t finish that sentence. That brings us up to age 14 and end of Act I, clocking in at one hour and 15 minutes.

Act II starts with Mr. Byrne as a teenager, failing miserably at different jobs: plumber, dishwasher, bathroom clerk, until he finally gets to answer an ad for amateur actors to be in a Shakespeare company. This is where he finds his niche and begins to find friends and gain self-confidence. He starts getting small parts and some recognition. He meets his Irish idol, actor Micheál Mac Liammóir and meets Richard Burton for a scene he has with him, being filmed in Venice. From that drunken evening spent with Mr. Burton, Mr. Byrne tells us his downfall from grace due to his alcoholism and ultimately his will to overcome his addiction. Finally ending with the deaths of his mother and his father. As Mr. Byrne tells us, he is walking with ghosts and all these ghosts are inside him now.

There have been many and often effective monologues by actors on the New York stage: Last year’s Reuben Santiago-Hudson in Lackawanna Blues; the late Carrie Fisher back in 2009 in Wishful Drinking; Jesse Tyler Ferguson playing 40 different characters in 2016 in Fully Committed. These stars had the ability to inform as well as entertain. They engaged us from start to finish.

This doesn’t impugn Mr. Byrne as an actor in any way. He has given Broadway three indelible performances: James Tyrone Jr. in A Moon for the Misbegotten, Cornelius Melody in A Touch of the Poet, and James Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey Into Night. He earned two Tony Award nominations for those roles.

However, with Walking With Ghosts, director Lonny Price should have known the tastes of American audiences better and done some strong editing and tightening. A lot of incidental fat could have been trimmed off.  We are left with Mr. Byrne not giving us a performance so much as exorcising his demons.

Edited by Scott Harrah
Published October 27, 2022
Reviewed at October 26, 2022 press preview performance.

‘WALKING WITH GHOSTS’: Gabriel Byrne. Photo: Emilio Madrid.