What is
"A Touch of the Poet"
all about?

Tara has presented many pieces over the years that deal with this eternal problem of the human condition.  This season, A Touch of the Poet by the Nobel prize-winning author, Eugene O'Neill, shows a stunning solution.  The protagonist, one Cornelius Melody, veteran of the Peninsular War under the Duke of Wellington, hero of the Battle of Talavera, lives a grubby life as owner of a small and unsuccessful inn near Boston, Massachusetts when the play opens on a summer day in 1828.

Born of common stock, Melody was raised to be a gentleman and almost succeeded in "rising above his station" with heroic action as an officer of Wellington's Heavy Dragoons.  But he threw that chance away and fled to the United States after the War of 1812. With him he took his peasant wife whom he could not respect even though he loved her, and an infant daughter.  Hoping to make his fortune and be accepted as a gentleman in the New World, Con Melody was again disappointed.  Swindled of his fortune, he found that the American aristocracy would also reject his aspirations. Not only was he poor, but Irish to boot!

He now leads an empty life, playing the role of aristocrat before an audience of bar room hangers-on.  Not only does the depraved quality of his gallery muddy the dream; his young daughter, Sara, looks with withering contempt upon his pretensions.  She has discovered her own way to rise above her contemptible surroundings.  She has met a young sprig of the American nobility (His father is a rich Yankee merchant.) and they have fallen in love.

Major Melody then has a large predicament placed before him by the hands of fate -- and his own mistakes.  If the aristocracy will not treat you as a gentleman, if you are married to a peasant woman, if your own daughter scorns your pretensions, if you are poor in an America which values a man's worth by the coin in his pocket, and if you're Irish in an early America that treated the Irish with contempt, how then can one play the aristocrat happily? Con's solution to this conundrum is to treat the problem the same way he has always treated obstacles - to bull his way through and beat down all resistance and ignore any contradictions.

But tonight is different.

Tonight, shattering events will make Con Melody's position untenable.  Dreams will shatter, blood will be spilt, and the fates of the protagonists will shiver on the brink of absolute ruin.  How O'Neill has his Major Melody deal with this last blow of Fate will astonish the audience in a stunning climax.