BRIAN Dennehy has long been a familiar presence in film and TV as the sort of gruff authority figure you don’t want to mess with. But in recent years he’s also methodically established himself as one of one of America’s finest stage actors, working his way through the dramatic canon and winning two Tony Awards in the process.
Now, after his triumphs with “Death of a Salesman” and “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” the veteran actor is returning to Broadway to star in an early work by Eugene O’Neill, the playwright whose life and work he has, as he puts it, “studied obsessively and compulsively for 30 years.” It’s the lurid “Desire Under the Elms,” in which he plays Ephraim Cabot, a farmer whose much younger second wife Abbie (Carla Gugino) initiates a torrid affair with her hunky stepson Eben (Pablo Schreiber).
The production originated at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, where Dennehy has long enjoyed a hugely successful collaboration with director Robert Falls. It began decades ago with such challenging fare as Brecht’s “Galileo” and O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh.”
“We set really high hurdles for ourselves in those days because we were young and drinking,” the actor recalls.
“The only rule was that it had to be something that neither one was sure we could actually pull off.”
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