drama major; Gabriel Byrne stars in the Roundabout's production of a Eugene O'Neill masterpiece.

The famously upbeat playwright Eugene O'Neill once wrote, "One's outer life passes in a solitude haunted by the masks of others; one's inner life passes in a solitude hounded by the masks of oneself." All of O'Neill's greatest characters-Hickey in The Iceman Cometh, James Tyrone in Long Day's Journey into Night-have built elaborate facades to hide their true selves. A perfect example is the vainglorious Con Melody, the tragic hero of A Touch of the Poet, who returns to the New York stage this month in the magnetic person of Gabriel Byrne.

Byrne, who is best known for playing brooding, morally flawed tough guys in such films as Miller's Crossing and The Usual Suspects, made his Broadway debut five years ago as Jamie Tyrone in O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten, capturing the fading spirit of a man losing his grip on life. As Con, a former swashbuckling Irish aristocrat and major in Wellington's army reduced to running an end-of-the-line tavern in nineteenth-century Massachusetts, Byrne will get to add a dash of leading-man elan to the more familiar O'Neill cocktail of self-deception, cruelty, alcoholism, and despair. "Con Melody is a distant cousin to Captain Boyle in Juno and the Paycock, with a touch of Stanley Kowalski and Heathcliff thrown in for good measure," Byrne says. "The ...