Gabriel Byrne’s ‘Walking With Ghosts’ Is Heading to Broadway

To Gabriel Byrne, his play “Walking With Ghosts,” which he adapted from his memoir of the same name, doesn’t refer to haunting phantoms but to the lost people and places we carry within us.

“Who we are now is the result of what we were,” Byrne said in a video interview.

In this solo show, he considers his sense of identity as an immigrant separated from his Irish homeland, and contemplates memories of love and failure as people age. The play, directed by Lonny Price, will begin performances in October at the Music Box Theater on Broadway.

“Walking With Ghosts” premiered in January at the Gaiety Theater in Dublin and will continue from Sept. 7-16 at the Apollo Theater in London before it begins 75 performances in New York.

Byrne described the feeling of returning to the New York stage as a soup of nerves and excitement. He said he wanted the show’s message surrounding the human experience to be and feel universal.

“As soon as you leave your place of belonging, in a strange way, you don’t belong anywhere else,” Byrne said, describing what it means to be an immigrant and to be home.

Byrne lives in Rockport, Maine. He grew up outside Dublin, in Walkinstown, as the oldest of six children. He left Ireland at age 11 to enroll in a Roman Catholic seminary in England, but renounced his faith after he said he was sexually abused by a priest.

Later, in college, he joined an acting troupe.

Byrne was most recently on the New York stage in 2016, playing James Tyrone in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” He played a survivor in a BBC adaptation of H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds” in 2019.

Price first directed Byrne in the New York Philharmonic’s production of “Camelot” in 2008. Impressed with Byrne’s performance, Price, who went on to direct “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill” and “Sunset Boulevard” on Broadway, said he was thrilled to work with Byrne again, as the actor embodied the friends, teachers, religious figures and family members who influenced his life.

“I think the play has a kind of healing quality to it where people look at their own lives and find peace,” Price said.

Byrne said that in writing the play, he aimed to provoke the audience into thinking about their lives, their parents and their decisions.

“My own belief is that every single person has an extraordinary story to tell, and what I’ve done is I’ve put mine down, not because I want people to think or look at my life,” he said. “I want people to look at their own.”