Emilio Madrid
The esteemed actor Gabriel Byrne is a wonderful storyteller; truly you could listen to him for hours. A “Gabriel Byrne Story Hour” to send us off to sleep would be just as effective as Golden Girls re-runs.
It is why our audience listened, utterly rapt, as he recited stories from his life in his one-man autobiographical play, Walking With Ghosts, which opens tonight at Broadway’s Music Box Theatre (through December 30). But some of the stories Byrne tells us, as beautifully distilled and performed from his bestselling memoir as they are, also feel not fully told. They touch on serious subjects, and things that have reverberated in his life—but the deeper ones feel too glancing in the telling. Unlike perhaps the full book, the stage show feels like a peekaboo exercise in memoir, and the reticence, or self-editing, or whatever it is, ill serves some of the material.
Directed by Lonny Price with perfect delicacy, Byrne—who won a Golden Globe for his role in In Treatment—takes us through slices of his life, seeing himself until the very end as a “ghost boy” progressing through times and incidents. The best moments of the play are suited to precise, close-ended moments in time. And then there is Byrne’s lyrical writing. As he begins the play: “So here I stand on a grey Dublin day, looking at the house we called home for so many years. The man I am now longing to see the world as a child again, when every sight and sound was a marvel. I can see myself, a ghost boy, running among the trees, and along by the river, past the chapel, the cinema, the factory, and up to the fields where the plough horses turned the black earth to the sun.”