By JOHN MCCLAIN

“A Touch of the Poet,” which opened at the handsomely renovated Helen Hayes Theatre last night is not one of Eugene O’Neill’s great plays, but even as one of his lesser ones it proves again that he is majestically alone in the American theatre.  One is apt to forget his extraordinary talent:  the great gift of drawing characters in depth, then pitting them one against the other will all nerves exposed.

This latest of his posthumous works to be offered in America is first of all a searing character study:  There is the cruel and sodden ex-officer in the British Army who is operating a tavern in the vicinity of Boston, circa 1828.  He lives in a drunken dream of past glories and a gentility to which he was not born.

There is his wife, the adoring biddy he plucked from the peat bogs of his native Ireland.  Her fierce devotion remains constant through all his tirades against the immigrant poor and the rising commercial aristocracy of the New World, neither of which class will accept him.

There is his daughter, resentful of his swaggering deceit, yet strangely possessed of the same pride which provokes it.

And there is the mother of a young man whose roots are deep in America, who is fighting for the survival of her son in a new society which has little use for the poetic postures of the Old World.

Finally, there is the young man.  He never appears onstage, but he is the voice of a thoughtful and awakened new land.

These characters are created with intensity and full dimension, and they immediately catch us.  When they are finally brought to grips we are transported by the conflict between father and daughter, his insane reaction to the patronizing Yankee mother and his abortive attempt to engage her husband in a duel.

In a gentler mood we are moved by the off-stage romance of the daughter and the poetic young man, the unreasoning love of the mother for both her husband and daughter.  And the final moments in which the father, at long last, gives up his losing battle.

That it is not a much greater play is due to the fact that the people themselves, however accurately painted, are not very sympathetic.

The father is an impossible fake and a bore, the mother is just plain stupid, the daughter is humorless and nagging. 

But against this you have the author’s magnificent skill in the construction of scenes like the one in which the daughter is trying to tell her mother that she has that night been deflowered while the mother, reverting to type, is only preoccupied with what she hopes her husband has done to the police.  Them dirty rats!

Helen Hayes quite blissfully runs away with the honors as the dedicated and long-suffering mother, easily transcending the fact that her dedication out-runs reality.

Eric Portman, regrettably does not give one of his greatest performances as the Major, merely because he could not always be understood.  His words climbed on top of one another, but even so it is a brilliant conception and will doubtless be corrected in time to come.

Kim Stanley is excellent in her inimitable manner, and Betty Field has a long scene as the mother of the off-scene lover which is brilliant.  And don’t forget Curt Conway, it says here on my cuff.

Harold Clurman, who directed, has done so with a notable lack of ostentation, and Ben Edwards’s set of an early American tavern will whet the appetites of many antique dealers.  Just take the glassware -- .

Once more Mr. O’Neill makes everybody else look silly.