For three hours every night, a gilded looking glass throws back at him the reflection of Cornelius (Con) Melody, the vain, deluded, cruel and charming preener at the heart of Eugene O'Neill's "A Touch of the Poet," now in previews at Studio 54. It opens Thursday.

A "shebeen" mirror is what the playwright specified in the work he left unproduced when he died in 1953 - "the kind you'd find in a shebeen, or tavern," Byrne says, "which is like saying 'shanty.'" In 1828 Massachusetts, where the play takes place, it had "the meaning of that same social class."

It's the class Con's pretty daughter, Sara (Emily Bergl), is hoping to climb out of by marrying the rich young Bostonian taken sick in the room upstairs. It's also the bog Irish background a whisky-wasted Con tries to hide when he declaims Byron in front of the mirror or poses in his British Army uniform on the anniversary of the Battle of Talavera against Napoleon.

But O'Neill's play is itself a "mirror [with] a most ingenuous and complex perspective," says Byrne, "on love, sexuality, marriage, loss, identity, truth and lies, pride and shame. O'Neill had a real Madonna-whore complex, too, which people never talk about. Theater is the mirror which holds up our own reflection and tells us who we are."

It was theater that got Byrne out of working-class Dublin, to the Abbey, Royal Court and National theaters, and star turns in such movies as "Miller's Crossing," "The Usual Suspects," and "A Dangerous Woman." "When I told my father, though," he says, "he told his friends down at the pub I'd joined the circus. I agree."

Some circus. O'Neill's anguished plays are among the most grueling an actor can take on - Byrne was nominated for a Tony in "Moon for the Misbegotten" on Broadway in 2000. Yet any stage work, he says, "requires you to keep the monsters of doubt and fear at bay. You have to sword-fight them constantly to prove to yourself that it just has to be done."

"Byrne has a real flare for O'Neill," says Steven Chaikelson, chairman of the Theatre Arts program at Columbia University. Chaikelson was general manager on "Moon for the Misbegotten." "It touches him deep down inside. Because of that, he brings a lot to any O'Neill play."

And he's not in it for the money. When Byrne has needed to supplement his income from indies - he has two coming out this year - he's signed up for such Hollywood fare as "Ghost Ship" and "Trial by Jury." This reminds him of another soft spot he has for the doomed, despised Con. "O'Neill was writing a lament about a world in which money had become everything," says the man whose ex-wife, actress Ellen Barkin, is now married to Revlon billionaire Ronald Perelman. "There's no code of conduct or honor anymore."

That travels all the way to the top, he says. The President of the United States has put us "back in another war, and the violence has just gotten worse."

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