"I was free so I went out. It was a very funny episode. The guy was hired to write a jingle but everything he wrote was to the tune of Old Macdonald Had a Farm and into the bargain he couldn't spell, so what he came up with was "beer and pretzels, that's our game. C-H-E-R-S."
"That was in the last series of Cheers so while I was doing that they were already getting ready to do Frasier and they asked me would I be interested. I said, well, I'd have to see a script. They mentioned Kelsey Grammer. Well, Kelsey had been so nice to me on Cheers that I said yeah, working with this guy could be good. They came up to Chicago with three writers and we went to dinner. I read the script over dinner and just said of course I'd do it, this is brilliant."
Mahoney loves the experience of doing Frasier, which consumes three weeks out of every four for seven-and-a-half months of his year.
"Journalists sniff around looking for problems. There aren't any. We hang out together, we are good friends, we go to each other's weddings, to each other's openings, they all came here to see Long Day's Journey. They are just a great group of people. Even Kelsey's problems - through it all he was just hurting himself, he was never anything but a gentleman to us, even at the depths the only hurt was for us looking at him. He was totally kind and loving as we were watching him killing himself. We did whatever we could for him and he worked it out and he has a lovely wife now, Camille, and he's fine. It's an odd thing to say but I miss them all painfully during the hiatus."
Those periods of downtime are the only time when John Mahoney flirts with loneliness. He escapes to his house on a lake on Wisconsin sometimes where he likes to float on a pontoon dangling a line in the water. Mainly, though, he likes to work.
He had a hideously unhappy three-year marriage at the end of his college life and hasn't been married since. The unattached life is a blessing work-wise and a burden in another sense.
He fends off loneliness with work, postpones coming home to an empty house. During the next run of Frasier he's planning to perform in The Weir by Conor McPherson, at the Geffen Playhouse, "because it's a wonderful play and because sometimes I go out of my mind in California. I'm bored. I go home, walk, sit in my apartment, read a book, have a few drinks, come back, read, go to bed. This play is going to be great. I'm looking forward to that because yeah, I do get lonely sometimes."
This past summer in Chicago has been a sweet one though, working at home, in a hugely challenging part which he has conquered to massive acclaim. Long Day's Journey Into Night is one of the jewels of Mahoney's career.
Mahoney was approached when the idea of an Irish Rep company was conceived in Chicago. The founders wanted some big names to launch the company and to haul in the subscribers. Mahoney was pitched a chance to play in Caesar and Cleopatra. "I'm interested," he said, "but not in that.
"I told them maybe a modern Irish play or an American-Irish play and that if I had my choice it would be Long Day's Journey Into Night. O'Neill is seminal. Everyone takes from him - Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Sam Shephard. The thread is all the way through there. In O'Neill's biography and his interviews he always said that the one thing we had to understand about him was that he was Irish. So I felt that he wasn't just the major American playwright of the last century but also perfect for kicking off an Irish rep company in Chicago."
So the nascent rep company jumped at Mahoney's idea and the director, Sheldon Patinkin - who Mahoney had last worked with on Krapp's Last Tape at the Beckett Festival - was equally enthused. Caesar and Cleopatra was ditched.
Long Day's Journey into Night was a critical and commercial success in Chicago this summer, the acclaim eclipsing even that for the city's other recent O' Neill production, Gabriel Byrne's Moon for the Misbegotten on Broadway. When the The Galway Arts Festival approached the Irish Rep brandishing an invitation, Mahoney didn't have to be asked twice.
"For me this is the thrill of a lifetime. Knock on wood, the Irish Rep company is off to a great start with a major success and thousands of subscriptions and now I get the chance to go and work in Ireland. The thought of Ireland, given my background, my name, the time I've spent there, is very special to me. Also, I get to show off a little bit in this great role in the hope that the theatres might invite me back to the Abbey or the Gate or Druid. That would be fantastic."
The depth and sincerity of John Mahoney's feelings for Ireland extends way beyond the toora-loora-loora-tis-an-Irish-lullaby stuff retailed by many Americans. In the last decade or so he has been drawn for longer and longer periods to the west coast and he fully intends that when Frasier winds up (in three years, he reckons) that he will retire to Ireland, living six months of the year on the west coast and six months in Chicago.
First though, he must grapple with James Tyrone, O' Neill's skinflint, failure of a father figure. Tyrone is a great writhing whale of a part and it has taken all of Mahoney's learning to fight him to a draw.
"The most exhausting role I have ever done in my life. Scaling Everest every day. Sometimes you make it and sometimes you don't. You never conquer it, you never make it your own. It's just too big, too muscular and I'm not strong enough to take it on and make it my own, I'm not sure anyone is. I give every ounce of what I've got every night though. Sometimes you can't wait to take your bow, you feel like you've seen the face of God. Then sometimes you're embarrassed, inside you know you haven't done it justice. As the run went on we did justice more than we didn't.
"Some performances I'd like to have back but every performance has left me drained."
He wouldn't have it any other way. He is happily addicted to his job, content that in the second chapter of his happy life he has made all the right choices.
"I would have loved to have had children. I've missed that but at the same time, this might sound spiritual but it's not, everything in my life that I've wanted I've got. The only thing was not having a family and if I'd had a family I would have passed up on the acting career I'm sure. You can't live in the YMCA when you are 37 and have kids. It all came late, but I think I would do the same again, make the same choice. Every minute, most every minute, of my life is happy. I don't know what that other life would have been like, but I know this life is a good and happy one."
Long Day's Journey Into Night, presented by the Irish Repertory of Chicago, opens at the Town Hall Theatre in the Galway Arts Festival, on Monday 24th (until 30th).
The Galway Arts Festival opens on Tuesday.