Walking With Ghosts (Play)

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    Gabriel Byrne Reflects on the End of His Broadway Show, and Tells T a Joke

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    ‘Walking With Ghosts,’ which closed Nov. 20, allowed the Irish actor to showcase his passion for the humor of everyday life.Gabriel Byrne is well aware he is not a Disney franchise. “I’m just one person, writing about myself,” said Byrne, 72, in a video interview on a recent morning before one of the final performances of his autobiographical one-man Broadway show, “Walking With Ghosts,” which closed more than a month early on Nov. 20. “I understand the reality of the marketplace and at the same time feel profoundly grateful I got here at all.”Originally slated to run through the end of December at the Music Box Theater, the show closed after just 25 performances and eight previews amid — to put it kindly — ticket sales that were a few zeros away from “Hamilton” or “Lion King” territory. But Byrne, who with his tousled gray hair, serious face and bright blue eyes behind tortoiseshell glasses, cuts a grandfatherly figure — if the grandfather in question were a famous Irish actor with a Golden Globe and a tendency to quote James Joyce — is a good sport about his early eviction notice. “How long a thing lasts isn’t a reflection of its essential worth,” he said. “A relationship that lasts 18 months can contain more within it than relationships that last 10 or 15 years.”The show, which is based on Byrne’s 2020 memoir of the same name, certainly had its fans, particularly when he performed it to sold-out crowds in Ireland, where he was born and spent the first 11 years of his life, and then in London’s West End earlier this year. While the Broadway run received mixed reviews, the New York Times critic Alexis Soloski praised Byrne’s charisma and stage presence, calling him “compulsively watchable.” “Who wouldn’t want to spend a clinical hour with this man?” she wrote. “Or two, plus intermission.”Gabriel Byrne in his one-man show, “Walking With Ghosts,” at the Music Box Theater in New York.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesByrne, who last appeared on Broadway in 2016 in a revival of Eugene O’Neill’s 1956 play “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” is best known for his roles in the HBO show “In Treatment” and the 1995 film “The Usual Suspects.” Even after the latter became a sleeper hit, opening a new chapter in his career as a leading man — during which he starred in “Stigmata” (1999) and “End of Days” (1999) — he maintained the workmanlike ethos of his journeyman days, gaining a reputation as a fiercely private person reluctant to claim the spotlight.So it was perhaps surprising that he chose to publish a second memoir. (His first, “Pictures in my Head,” was published in 1994 and covered his childhood in Ireland and the start of his acting career.) The second book, which a Washington Post reviewer wrote “dazzles with unflinching honesty,” similarly focuses on Byrne’s upbringing in a working-class family on the rural outskirts of Dublin and his subsequent journey to Hollywood. But it also travels to darker places, like the period in the early 1960s when the 11-year-old Byrne was sexually abused by a priest at the Catholic seminary school he attended in England.The biggest challenge in adapting his latest memoir for the stage, he said, was trimming some of its reflective aspects to make space for moments that would be more compelling for a live audience. “If it doesn’t work dramatically — if it’s not propulsive, emotional — you get rid of it,” he said. “You can’t put big lumps of prose onstage.” He opted to perform the play on a nearly bare stage, wearing the same blue shirt, blue vest, blue blazer, gray slacks and black boots throughout and striding from one end to the other between scenes as the house went dark to indicate changes in time and location. “The anti-razzle dazzle allows you to concentrate on what’s being said,” he said.The cover of Byrne’s 2020 memoir, “Walking With Ghosts.”Courtesy of Grove PressGrowing up, Byrne wanted to be a priest. But after he was sexually abused, he renounced his faith, cycling through jobs as a dishwasher, a plumber and a toilet attendant before joining an amateur acting troupe in Dublin, where he rediscovered his boyhood love of theater.That led to his TV debut in 1978 in the soap opera “The Riordans,” then to his film debut in the 1981 retelling of the King Arthur legend “Excalibur,” and finally to Hollywood stardom, which brought him into the same circles as luminaries like Richard Burton and Vanessa Redgrave. But that’s not the part of his life he chose to highlight in either of his memoirs or his stage play, which essentially ignores the latter part of his life and acting career. “What you do is only a very small part of who you are,” he said. “Finding your identity through your work is a limited way of knowing yourself.”Instead, he said, he wanted to emphasize experiences people could relate to, themes that felt universal — for instance, that of searching for a sense of rootedness as an immigrant living away from his homeland (he moved to New York in the mid-1980s to be with his then partner, the actor Ellen Barkin; they divorced in 1999 but he remained in the States). “Every immigrant has a yearning to be at home,” he said. “But you can never be at home anywhere once you leave. You trade one place for another, but you don’t really belong in either.”Of course, he said, dredging up his memories of abuse or recounting the death of a boyhood friend every night is hardly enjoyable. But it is a willingness to explore those uncomfortable places, he said, that gives the show its power. “By going there, you’re opening the door for somebody else in the audience to maybe go there, too,” he explained.That is not to say there weren’t lighthearted moments. Among the dozens of characters from his past that Byrne embodies are friends, teachers, religious figures, family members and even the various actors in the amateur theater troupe he joined (Soloski wrote that the show “allows him to show a playful side and a gift, neglected in Hollywood, for physical comedy”). “You can’t just get up there and start telling serious stories,” Byrne said. “You have to leaven it with a spoonful of sugar.”Though he is finished with “Walking With Ghosts” — for now — he suggested that a return to the blue blazer and black boots may not be far off. He’s had offers to do the show in other cities — he has his eye on Boston, Chicago and San Francisco, he said — and international plans are in the works. “The producers want it to go to Australia and Canada,” said Byrne, who lives in Rockport, Maine, with his wife, Hannah Beth King, a documentary filmmaker, and their young daughter. (He has two adult children with Barkin.) “We’ll see. I don’t think Sunday night is the end of it.”In the meantime, he’s working on a new book, his first novel, which will explore themes of immigration and exile. He’s also looking forward to catching up on the movies he hasn’t had time to see and popping in and out of Broadway theaters — now as an audience member. (On his list: The recent revival of “Death of a Salesman.”) “I’ve been living in the world of books and the streets of New York, which is a continuous novel,” he said. “You never stop turning the pages.” More

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      ‘Walking With Ghosts’ Review: Gabriel Byrne Roams His Past

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      The Irish actor’s one-man show on Broadway delves into painful and playful memories alike. He even imitates the oddballs of his Dublin boyhood.The Irish actor Gabriel Byrne has a genius for listening. On the HBO show “In Treatment,” playing a psychologist wrestling with his own internal conflicts, he spent minutes at a time in silence, as tides of concern and compassion flowed and ebbed across his handsome, craggy face. But “Walking With Ghosts,” his autobiographical one-man show at the Music Box Theater, directed by Lonny Price, finds him alone onstage, within a series of retreating golden frames. And so Byrne, with no one to listen to, kindles into speech.The show is drawn, often verbatim, from Byrne’s recent memoir of the same name. Slipping back and forth in time, the book traces the 72-year-old actor’s life from boyhood on the rural outskirts of Dublin to his eventual success. The wispy show, by contrast, follows a strict chronology, but even here Byrne favors association over causality, image over argument — offering a slide show of the mind, with little relation between and among the anecdotes. He claims to feel like “an intruder in my own past. Emigrant, immigrant, exile.” Yet his recollections are vivid and immediate. At times the form echoes Wordsworth’s “The Prelude,” a catalog of experiences that will go on to shape the mature artist’s mind and soul.“Walking With Ghosts” has the texture of a vanity project. Nearly every autobiographical show does. And during a preview performance, the audience — “In Treatment” fans, perhaps, or devotees of Byrne’s 1995 film “The Usual Suspects” — rewarded that vanity, laughing at jokes before Byrne delivered the punch lines, sighing sympathetically at the sad parts. But Byrne is a serious writer, rendering memory and image in the energetic vernacular of his childhood: “slingeing along,” “stravaging,” “gobdaw.” And he is a serious actor, too, which eases the self-indulgence. The script, while often mournful, allows him to show a playful side and a gift, neglected in Hollywood, for physical comedy. In one sequence, he imitates the oddballs of his boyhood. In another, he shows how the various actors in the amateur theater troupe he joined take their bows. Who wouldn’t want to spend a clinical hour with this man? Or two, plus intermission.And yet, the transition from page to stage feels undermotivated, incomplete. The lively language shifts easily enough from prose to monologue, and Byrne — with his wide, serious face, his bright, worried eyes, his voice like the growl of a polite bear — is compulsively watchable. What the show lacks (and this is true of the memoir, as well) is a sense of why he’s examining his life now. In public. Why would a man lay himself bare like this, on Broadway? It’s hard to discern because the show all but ignores the latter part of his life and acting career.“Walking With Ghosts” never provides satisfying answers, even as it keeps the focus relentlessly on Byrne, with little to distract from his performance. He wears the same clothes throughout — blue shirt, blue vest, blue blazer, gray slacks — and he sketches characters sparingly, with accents and funny voices kept to a minimum. Byrne, who last visited Broadway in 2016 with “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” appears at ease on the stage, bestriding it as easily as another man might stroll his own patio.Minimal set and lighting design, by Sinéad McKenna, keeps the focus on Byrne’s performance.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFor better or worse, Price’s direction is mostly unfelt. Price has him move backward, beyond another arch or two, as he reaches into the past and forward as he nears the present day, finally sitting at the lip of the stage as he discusses his alcoholism and the sobriety he ultimately achieved, twentysome years ago. Otherwise the interventions are few.The design can also feel less than intentional, slapdash almost. As imagined by Sinéad McKenna, the set’s back wall is a mirror, riven with cracks. Apt enough. But the way in which the lights (McKenna) play against it turns Byrne’s shadow upside down, so that it lurks behind him, like a vampire bat. The sound and music, by Sinéad Diskin, come and go, sometimes offering a sense of place, at other times leaving place ambiguous, universal.Byrne unearths embarrassing memories and painful ones, like the death of a boyhood friend and an incident of predation by a priest at the seminary he attended for a few years. Later, he finds that the priest doesn’t remember him. Byrne, though he has blacked out some of what occurred, can’t forget it. But in general, he seems to have had that rare thing for an artist — a happy childhood, loved by parents who loved each other. He is elegiac in recalling a celebration at the Guinness brewery, his grandmother’s love of the movies.Whether discussing good memories or bad ones, the show rarely draws connections — the kinds a clinician might encourage — between the boy Byrne was and the actor he became. In fairness, neither does “The Prelude.” At times, Byrne suggests some internal restlessness and malleability, an inability to settle himself to any particular practice or trade, which may have fitted him for acting. (With the priesthood barred, he rapidly cycled through stints as a plumber, a dishwasher and a toilet attendant.) But aside from one comic story about scenery chewing — and scenery breaking — on an early television play, he never discusses his practice or art. The boy and the professional man seem to exist separately, not continuously.The show seems to conclude with a kind of resignation and acceptance, that if the people of his past are dead now, they persist within him. How those ghosts have made him and shape him and haunt his work still? That remains unspoken.Walking With GhostsThrough Dec. 30 at the Music Box Theater, Manhattan; gabrielbyrneonbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. More

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      Gabriel Byrne’s ‘Walking With Ghosts’ Is Heading to Broadway

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      The play, adapted from his memoir of the same name, will run for 75 performances starting in October.To Gabriel Byrne, his play “Walking With Ghosts,” adapted from his memoir of the same name, doesn’t refer to haunting phantoms but the lost people and places that we carry within us.“Who we are now is the result of what we were,” Byrne said in a video interview.In this autobiographical solo show, he tackles identity as an immigrant separated from his Irish homeland, along with memories of love and failure as people age. The play, directed by Lonny Price, will begin performances in October on Broadway at the Music Box Theater.The show premiered in January at the Gaiety Theater in Dublin and will continue from Sept. 7 to Sept. 16 in London’s Apollo Theater before it begins 75 performances in New York.Byrne described the feeling of returning to the New York City stage as a soup of nerves and excitement. As both a writer of and performer in the show, he said he wants the message surrounding the human experience to be and feel universal.He makes reference to what it means to be an immigrant and to be home.“As soon as you leave your place of belonging, in a strange way, you don’t belong anywhere else,” Byrne said.Although Byrne lives in Rockport, Maine, he grew up outside Dublin, in Walkinstown, the oldest of six. He left Ireland at age 11 to enroll in a Catholic seminary in England, but renounced his faith after he said he was sexually abused by a priest.He later joined an acting troupe in college. Byrne was most recently on the New York City stage as James Tyrone in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” in 2016. He played a survivor in a BBC adaptation of H.G. Wells’s “War of the Worlds” in 2019.Lonny Price first directed Byrne in the New York Philharmonic’s “Camelot” in 2008. Impressed with Byrne’s performance, Price, who directed “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill” and “Sunset Boulevard,” said he was thrilled to work alongside Byrne again, as the actor embodies the friends, teachers, religious figures and family members that influenced his life.“I think the play has a kind of healing quality to it where people look at their own lives and find peace,” Price said.Byrne said that in the play, he aims to provoke the audience into thinking about their lives, their parents and their decisions.“My own belief is that every single person has an extraordinary story to tell and what I’ve done is I’ve put mine down, not because I want people to think or look at my life,” he said. “I want people to look at their own.” More