O’Neill junkie Brian Dennehy follows up James Tyrone with Hughie at Trinity BY CAROLYN CLAY

Some folks are suckers for exhaustion. After spending four months last spring and summer in the monumental crucible of Long Day’s Journey into Night, for which effort he won the Tony Award for Best Actor, Brian Dennehy decided he hadn’t had enough of Eugene O’Neill. "I would have loved to have done that for another six months or so," the actor says of the all-star Broadway revival in which he played poverty-haunted patriarch James Tyrone opposite Vanessa Redgrave, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Robert Sean Leonard. "I’m one of few American actors who actually likes long runs. You really don’t learn a part until you’ve done it a couple of hundred times." Even without all that practice, Dennehy’s Tyrone — sagging visibly as hope for family salvation ebbed, touchingly bewildered by the drug-fueled retreat of the wife he adored — was near-perfect. And now he has another chance to feed his O’Neill habit, since he’s starring in a Trinity Repertory Company revival of the 1928-set one-act Hughie.

Although it appears to be a 4 a.m. duet for down-on-his-luck Broadway gambler "Erie" Smith and the enervated night clerk of a fleabag hotel (played by long-time Dennehy compatriot Joe Grifasi), Hughie amounts to a monologue for the hustler nicknamed for his Pennsylvania birthplace — a ramble marked by quaint slang, pretend savvy, and sadness. At Trinity, it’s on a double bill with Irish writer Sean O’Casey’s short comedy A Pound on Demand, in which Dennehy and Grifasi appear with Trinity stalwarts William Damkoehler and Cynthia Strickland. Centered on a couple of drunken Irishmen trying to cop a loan at the post office, Pound is, according to Dennehy, "one of the most politically incorrect plays that anyone will see around here in a long time." Both pieces are helmed by Catherine Baker Steindler, who served as director Robert Falls’s assistant on Long Day’s Journey.

The Dennehy I meet during a rehearsal break is surprisingly unassuming for a man who has won two of the past five Tony Awards for Best Actor, the first in 1999 for his rugged yet fragile Willy Loman in the Falls-directed revival of Death of a Salesman. Maybe all the years of second-tier movie stardom in the likes of Semi-Tough, Cocoon, and Presumed Innocent have kept him humble. The burly actor is also a shadow of his former self, having lost 60 pounds in the past six months. "I’m getting in shape for my 70s," the 65-year-old Irish-American quips.

"I wasn’t ready to leave O’Neill," Dennehy continues, "though, God knows, now I’m definitely questioning my sanity. I had seen Hughie twice. I saw Jason [Robards] do it and Ben Gazzara do it. Of course, Jason was the ultimate O’Neill actor. There’s even a physical resemblance, and there certainly was a biographical relationship: both sons of actors, both had their problems with alcohol, both dealing with Irishness and rage and darkness. There was a symmetry between the two of them that no other actor can approach. But, having said that, that doesn’t mean you don’t try when given the opportunity to do those parts. One of the good things about being an actor is taking a whack at one of those things. And Hughie was something I wanted to try. I’m really too old for it, but that didn’t make any difference to Oskar [Eustis, artistic director of Trinity Rep]. He’s supposed to be 45, so I’ve got 20 years on top of that. And, you know, I feel it."

Although Dennehy describes himself as a more instinctual than intellectual actor, he has done some thinking about Erie, the low-rent craps shooter chewing a night clerk’s ear off in Hughie. "It’s interesting about this part. O’Neill can be described in many ways, but one of the words you probably would not automatically use in relation to him is delicate. He’s usually powerful but uncomplicated. But Erie is an unusually delicate, contradictory character. He strikes you as being single-dimensional, not thug-like but a street guy. And if it’s done right, he reveals himself to be extremely sentimental and emotional and delicate by the end of the show.

"The thing about Erie is that he’s constructed himself into something that is very different from what he was. He’s made himself into this New York guy, this wise guy, this Broadway guy — what he thinks a Broadway guy looks and sounds like. As O’Neill does a lot of the time, it’s got a real strong sound, which you’ve got to deal with. And he has a real specific character. What you realize when you start to work on it is that it’s not his character at all. But you can’t lose the fact that from the beginning he puts up this façade that’s very strong — misleading, but authentic in a sense. And it works. Unlike Willy and Tyrone, where you’re trying to find the reality of the character, with Hughie you’re trying to find the bullshit of the character. You’ve got to find the bullshit of the character, and then you’ve got to hide the reality and let the reality peek through. But the bullshit’s much more important to him than the reality."

Hughie and A Pound on Demand are at Trinity Repertory Company, 201 Washington Street in Providence, February 20 through March 28. Tickets are $38 to $55; call (401) 351-4242.