Former snooker great Alex Higgins (left) and actor Richard Dormer on stage after one of Dormer's performances of "Hurricane," Dormer's one-man show on Higgins's life.

And then, to its delight and amazement, the Hurricane himself, as he has done elsewhere, emerged from the back of the theater to join the actor/writer on stage.

Walking back up the aisle, he shook hands with people, some of whom possibly have never seen a snooker game.

"I warmed to it more or less straight away," Higgins said about the play in an interview earlier.

Not that it could be easy sitting through the story of his rise and fall, his two broken marriages, and the resultant absence from the lives of his daughter and son, his alcoholism, and his throat cancer and also the reminder that despite his extraordinary fame he's been left without anything to show for it in material terms.

"I've seen it between 30 and 40 times now," Higgins said. "I'm a bit more relaxed with it.

"I knew I got up to all sorts of things, as scallywags do, but sometimes when Richard portrays me on the stage, it leaves me a bit aghast. Otherwise it's a very good portrayal.

"There were a lot of mistakes in my life; obviously you'd like to change those if you could, but you can't turn back life," he added.

As Higgins amiably greeted theatergoers after the show, there was evidence of the charisma that helped make him hugely popular through the 1970s and '80s. Posters were bought and he signed them.

One immigrant from Glasgow introduced himself, his girlfriend and another couple. The Scot confessed to being a Celtic fan, noting that the star's allegiances were elsewhere. They agreed, though, that both Rangers and Celtic should compete in a league with the major English clubs.

Dormer's play recalls a time when there was more snooker on television than soccer. Though it's still popular, its heyday in terms of ratings began in 1974 -- by which time color TV, for which it was perfect, was quickly becoming the norm -- and continued up to 1986. New major competitions, in addition to the world championship, sprang up to cater for the demand.

Its 1970s revival owed a great deal to Higgins, who gate-crashed upon the scene, winning the world championship on his first attempt in 1972. For the next eight years, he toured Britain and Ireland.

"You got your earning from exhibitions, just like a rock-band would," he recalled. "It was a very hard life.

"But equally I made myself very well-liked by the public."

He won the world championship again in 1982, a victory dramatically recalled by Dormer in the play's final moment.

"I wasn't playing with the same type of fluency that I had before," Higgins remembered.

And the game was changing. Dormer's play refers to the "percentage" game that was emerging.

Higgins went further. "Not percentage. They were frightened to play," he said. For him, combining flair and speed was part of the entertainment.

Only his friend and protégé Jimmy "Whirlwind" White, a Londoner, plays with a similar panache and can claim anything approaching the same popularity.

Recently, White called up a New York-based mutual friend, Dubliner Conleth Dunne, to recommend "Hurricane."

Recalled Dunne: "Jimmy said to me, "You've got to see it; it's an incredible performance.'"

And after it was over, he agreed that indeed it was. Both Dunne and Corkman Ian O'Mahony, who plays snooker in the New York area, shook their heads remembering the genius that was Hurricane Higgins, his lightening game, and how he threw the force of his body into the shots, all the time thinking several moves ahead.

Even this year, filling in for a friend, Higgins got a break of 142, just short of the snooker's maximum break of 147, a rare enough achievement.

Dunne showed Higgins a photo of two of them in Dublin, saying: "It must be 30 years ago."

"Twenty-eight years ago," Higgins replied, recalling the precise occasion and venue. Dunne laughed, marveling that his old friend could remember back through the fog of time.

Earlier, Higgins perused a local daily in a way that was reminiscent of his snooker style. He scanned the pages quickly, taking in information, making comments and asking questions. He was curious about New York, but it seemed, he said, "too monolithic." There was too much to take in. It was also too warm and he was jetlagged. Finally, he decided the best thing about the city were its Irish pubs, and he'd visit a few of them on Independence Day, if he could avoid getting run over by yellow taxis.

"I'm getting used to the traffic lights," he said. "I've been here once or twice before, for the fisticuffs at Madison Square Garden."

Inevitably it was the racing pages which intrigued him most and he returned to them several times, trying to make some sense of the Belmont Park card.

Higgins said that he decided against seeing "Seabiscuit," the movie about the 1930s racehorse.

"I thought it would be too American, too over the top," he said.

He's read widely about the careers of the great racehorses, though, and said that his all-time favorite is the French-trained Sea Bird II, which won eight of its nine races, including the 1965 Epsom Derby.

Born in 1949 into a working-class Protestant family in Belfast, Alexander Gordon Higgins's first venture into the professional sporting world was as an apprentice jockey in England. In Dormer's play, it's his mother who encourages him to follow his dreams. His father, whom Higgins said was a maintenance worker on the railways, wants him to get a steady job in Belfast, such as in the shipyards.

When racing didn't work out, he went home to Belfast, taking up again his childhood passion, snooker. His meteoric rise to "people's champion" began with the Northern Ireland amateur title and then the all-Ireland title.

"Hurricane" doesn't hold back in showing Higgins's self-destructive tendencies, but it sympathizes with him in his war against the game's authorities, which hemmed in its greatest talent and its greatest asset, constantly fining him for infractions.

Dormer has Higgins say: "I'm the best thing that happened to snooker; snooker may have been the worst thing that happened to me."

Higgins explained that decades ago that a garage or a fish-and-chip shop owner typically managed a rising star. Then came the sharks who stole them off the small-time operators.

"I know Americans are oblivious to snooker," he said, but added they would be familiar with the unscrupulous boxing-promoter type. It's people like that who've been running the sport over the last 15 or 20 years, he argued.

"I felt I was unjustly treated," Higgins said. "They took away my livelihood."

The players today don't have the love for the game, and don't play with the same energy, though they earn more than he ever did. But at least, he added, there's no more tobacco advertising in the game.

Another pressure came from the incessant attention from the tabloid press, and he became one of its favorite bad boys.

The play refers to an early meeting with another hell-raiser, Oliver Reed. Higgins recalled the actor's unpredictability.

"He frightened the life out of me," he said. "I didn't know what he was going to do next."

Over the years, they became close and Higgins recalled Reed, who died in 1999, with great affection.

"Every six months or so, I'd get the train from Belfast to Dublin, and then to Cork," he said.

He said the actor was very contented living near the village of Buttevant, in remotest County Cork. "Charleville [the nearest town] was like New York to him, the big smoke," he said.

One morning, staying with Reed, he opened a tabloid to see an all-time top-10 list of celebrity bad boys. Higgins told his host that he'd been voted No. 5, with Keith Richard topping the list. Reed beamed until Higgins added: "And I'm No. 3."

Reed's widow, he said, remarried and now has a baby. "I'm sure Oliver is looking down, very happy," he said.

Alex Higgins himself seemed contented. His philosophy might well be summed up in one of Dormer's lines: "Don't pity me, I stood on top of the world."

And he's no doubt that the ecstatic applause at the end of "Hurricane" is partly for him.

As one critic put it, never has a life where talented was so wasted been made to look so heroic.

For Higgins, there's another reason.

"Again, it's the way I play snooker, in a very energetic and fresh way," he said. "In this particular play, you've got an actor who gives a very energetic and explosive performance, so when they see this guy perform, they think, 'He must have been a mean player.' "