O’Byrne wins Tony for ‘Frozen’

The lanky, affable actor from the County Cavan town of Mullagh had been previously nominated for his work in plays by Martin McDonagh. First there was “The Beauty Queen of Leenane” and then “The Lonesome West,” for which, in addition to the Tony nomination, O’Byrne received the Irish Times’ Best Actor Award.
Until this week, however, the Tony Award had eluded him.
O’Byrne has an unusually clear insight into the nature of the man he is playing, a view that might disturb some people who see the play.
“He’s kind of an Everyman,’ the actor said, sitting in his dressing room at the Circle-in-the-Square Theater as a makeup artist freshened the tattoos that cover his arms and shoulders and that have to be attended to before every performance.
“He’s like the guy sitting next to you. He’s like the guy in your family. He’s like the guy you buy a newspaper from. There?s nothing special about this guy, about who he is. The events around him are extraordinary, and what he actually does is extraordinary, but to actually create this character, we had to look for the ordinariness of him. That?s the thing that we had to search for.?
Like most really intelligent actors, O?Byrne has created a solid, complicated ?backstory? for his character, a detailed history, some of which was contained, or at least implied, in playwright Lavery?s manuscript, but other portions of which were meticulously worked out by the performer himself.
?His history,? O?Byrne said, ?is that he was fostered out as a kid and jumped around various foster homes. He?s not the brightest guy. In fact, he?s not bright at all. He?s not a smart guy at all, and we think he probably works as a repair man for boilers, and he travels doing that work.?
Ralph?s specific occupation is something O?Byrne and playwright Lavery worked out in rehearsals. It isn?t in the script.
During the rehearsal period, before ?Frozen? opened off-Broadway at a theater on East 13th Street, where it played a sold-out run before transferring to Broadway, the cast was provided with a large amount of research material to help them with their work.
?This guy is based in some ways on a murderer in Britain named Robert Black,? O?Byrne said. ?There was a man named Ray Wyre who wrote a book made up of conversations he?d had with Black about a year before his trial.?
Something similar occurs in the play with an American doctor, a ?forensic psychiatrist,? Agnetha, played by Laila Robins.
?Some of the stuff I say is verbatim from those interviews,? O?Byrne said. ?The book is called ?Murder of Childhood,? and they reckon he killed maybe up to 15 people.?
When O?Byrne first encountered Wyre?s book, he had serious doubts about its usefulness. ?I remember thinking that I didn?t really want to discover what the guy was into,? he said.
As O?Byrne read on, he changed his mind.
?It was so bizarre,? he said. ?The guy?s rationale was that he would kill these girls because he didn?t want to hurt them. That was his compulsion. That was it. Once you start going in that direction, you realize it isn?t a rational thing.?
In a sense, it was Wyre?s book that made O?Byrne start thinking in terms of his character?s ordinariness.
?This guy doesn?t think the way the rest of us do,? he said, ?but he does it in a very ordinary way. The trick in playing him is to make the compulsion he has very ordinary. He thinks, ?Well, of course I?ve got a pillow in the back of the car, and a sleeping bag, just in case a girl comes along.? It?s just what he does. He doesn?t have the capacity to judge what he does. That?s the scary thing about people we deem as being evil. They are outside the bounds of ordinary morality.?
Unsurprisingly, ?Frozen? has attracted a fair number of psychiatrists and other medical people. ?The American in the play states that a lot of what Ralph does is a result of damage done to his brain in childhood,? the actor said. ?Psychiatrists who?ve seen the play tend to say that the theory put forth in the script hasn?t been disproven.?
At one point, a group of psychiatrists, some of them Irish, saw the play off-Broadway and O?Byrne had coffee with them afterwards.
?It was interesting to listen to them talking about the behavior of this guy, saying things like, ?Well, obviously, that?s what?s going on,? ? O?Byrne said. ?It was kind of gratifying for me to sit back and realize that they believed the character I?m playing. The great thing about this play is the fact that it provokes discussion. People want to stay around and talk about it after its over.?
On Tuesday nights, ?Frozen? has a 7 o?clock curtain, allowing time for the post-play discussions O?Byrne finds so valuable. Ironically, there was a point when it seemed he might not be around to take part in them.
When it wasn?t entirely certain that ?Frozen? would make the move to Broadway, O?Byrne agreed to honor an old commitment to play Mitch, Blanche DuBois?s suitor, in a Kennedy Center production of Tennessee Williams?s ?A Streetcar Named Desire.?
Had ?Frozen? not transferred, and had O?Byrne been in the D.C. Williams revival, he would have found himself working for Galway-based director Garry Hines, who guided his work in ?The Beauty Queen of Leenane.?
Not only that, but he would have been working with actress Amy Ryan, the Stella of the new production and, as it happens, O?Byrne?s serious longterm girlfriend, from whom he parted a while back.
Would that have presented a problem? ?Not really,? the actor said. ?We?re both adults.?
O?Byrne pretty much reached that adulthood here in the U.S., as opposed to his native Cavan. He came to New York for the first time as a teenager, intending to do construction work in order to make enough money to finance his education in drama at Trinity.
?I came over to live for the summer with my Uncle Liam, who?s an electrician in Queens, but I had a wild time and I had to borrow money to get home,? O?Byrne said.
The actor finds an irony involving what he did when he first visited New York and what he?s been doing lately.
?I earned 25 percent more money on a building site 17 years ago than I made when we were doing this play off-Broadway,? he said. ?So, am I going up or down in the world? I don?t know.?
Winning the Tony award on Sunday night the only victory among the four categories in which the play and its people were nominated, should answer that question.
Now 37, O?Byrne?s definitely in demand. In fact, at 6 a.m. this past Monday, only a few hours after he won his Tony, he flew to California, taking a few days off from ?Frozen.?
The job that called him to Los Angeles was a small role in a new film directed and starring Clint Eastwood. In the film, currently titled ?Million Dollar Baby,? O?Byrne will be supporting not only Eastwood, but Morgan Freeman and Hilary Swank as well.
The film required him to be away from New York, and from ?Frozen? for just four days, only one of which involved shooting.
?I play an American priest and I?ve got several scenes with Eastwood,? O?Byrne said. ?It?s just a day?s work, but Eastwood is famous for working fast, because he?s so well organized.?
So, these days, is Brian F. O?Byrne.