Tag Archives: Irish Repertory Theatre

ENDGAME

Clov (Bill Irwin) peers at Hamm (John Douglas Thompson) in Irish Rep adaptation of Beckett’s Endgame (photo by Carol Rosegg)

ENDGAME
Irish Repertory Theatre, Francis J. Greenburger Mainstage
132 West 22nd St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Wednesday – Sunday through April 9, $25-$95
212-727-2737
irishrep.org

The Queen’s Pawn Opening is one of the safest first moves in chess. But there’s not much that’s safe in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, which is named after the strategic maneuverings when there are only a few pieces left on the board and the match is approaching its conclusion.

The end is near from the very beginning of Endgame, as Clov (Bill Irwin) declares, “Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished.” That opening salvo leads to eighty-five minutes of thrilling confusion as four characters face the end of everything in a seemingly postapocalyptic world. “I can’t be punished any more,” Clov claims, since for him life is nothing but suffering.

Clov, who limps severely, is a servant toiling for the mysterious, blind Hamm (John Douglas Thompson), a regal, angry figure in a homemade wheelchair: a chair attached to a wooden platform with wheels on it. When we first see Hamm, his face is covered by a bloody handkerchief; beneath it, he wears steampunk goggles. A ratty blanket is wrapped around his lower half; he can’t see or walk.

To Hamm’s right is a pile of garbage and two metal trash cans, where his “accursed progenitors” reside, his father, Nagg (Joe Grifasi), and mother, Nell (Patrice Johnson Chevannes), who have no legs. Thus, three of the characters cannot move on their own, and the fourth has major difficulty getting around. Even Hamm’s dog, a stuffed toy, is missing an appendage.

“Oh, I am willing to believe they suffer as much as such creatures can suffer,” Hamm says. “But does that mean their sufferings equal mine? No doubt. No, all is a — [yawns] — bsolute, the bigger a man is the fuller he is. And the emptier. . . . Enough, it’s time it ended, in the shelter, too. And yet I hesitate, I hesitate to . . . to end. Yes, there it is, it’s time it ended and yet I hesitate to — [yawns] — to end.”

Hamm, Clov, Nell, and Negg are living in some kind of end times, in a dingy basement dungeon that resembles a dark corner alley. Occasionally, Hamm calls for Clov to look through two small windows behind a brick wall in the back. To do so, Clov has to get out a step ladder, struggle uncomfortably to the wall, go up the ladder dragging one of his legs, and then peer through the gaps with a small telescope. On one side is a dim landscape, the other the sea, with nary a human being anywhere.

Nell (Patrice Johnson Chevannes) and Nagg (Joe Grifasi) share a laugh in Endgame (photo by Carol Rosegg)

However, when Clov aims the glass at the audience, he says, “I see . . . a multitude . . . in transports . . . of joy.” It’s one of several moments when the characters acknowledge that they are in a play with people watching them. Later, Clov threatens to leave, asking Hamm, “What is there to keep me here?” Hamm responds, “The dialogue.”

Hamm also makes references to “asides” and a “soliloquy”; when he calls for his gaff, Clov brings him the spear with a hook (used for fishing, sailing, and impaling), which resembles the vaudeville hook that unceremoniously pulls performers offstage when their acts go sour. In England, “gaff” is slang for “home,” something the four characters don’t exactly have. Scanning his surroundings, Hamm tells Clov, “My house a home for you. . . . But for Hamm, no home.”

The characters are like chess pieces, unable to move well on their own. “Take me for a little turn,” Hamm commands Clov, who awkwardly pushes him slowly around the room until Hamm barks, “Back to my place! Is that my place? . . . Put me right in the center!” as if he is the king on a chessboard demanding to be returned to his noble space, where he rules over nothing, the end in view, and not necessarily unwelcome. “The whole place stinks of corpses,” Hamm says. “The whole universe,” Clov adds. “To hell with the universe,” Hamm spits out. A few beats later, Clov declares, “The end is terrific!”

The cast is also terrific in this solid if not-quite-spectacular adaptation, directed by Ciarán O’Reilly. Longtime Shakespeare and August Wilson stalwart Thompson (Jitney, The Merchant of Venice) is majestic as Hamm in his return to the Irish Rep, where in 2009 he portrayed the title character in O’Reilly’s adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, spending much of the time on an oversized, red-draped throne. When Hamm calls out, “My kingdom for a nightman!,” it feels like a nod to Thompson’s numerous Bard performances, which do not include playing Richard III. However, the whistle Hamm keeps blowing grows ever-more annoying.

Hamm (John Douglas Thompson) sits center stage throughout Beckett adaptation at Irish Rep (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Tony winner Irwin (Old Hats, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) is sublime as the put-upon Clov, a role that fits him to a T; Irwin is a vaudeville-style clown who has played Vlad and Lucky in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Hamm in a 2012 revival of Endgame in San Francisco as well as starring in his one-man show On Beckett, which was staged at the Irish Rep in 2018 and again (online) during the pandemic lockdown.

Chevannes (runboyrun/In Old Age, I’m Revolting) and Grifasi (Dinner at Eight, The Boys Next Door) are hilarious as Hamm’s parents, whose bins are just far enough apart to prevent them from kissing, an apt metaphor for the lack of connection that comes with the end (and with pandemics).

Charlie Corcoran’s dingy set evokes the end times, along with Orla Long’s costumes, which seem to decay right on the characters’ bodies. Michael Gottlieb’s lighting and M. Florian Staab’s sound enhance the dread, with fun props by Deirdre Brennan that ratchet up the humor. The eighty-five-minute play, which Beckett claimed was his personal favorite, debuted at the Royal Court in London in 1957 and was previously presented at the Irish Rep in 2005, directed by Charlotte Moore and starring Tony Roberts as Hamm, Adam Heller as Clov, Kathryn Grody as Nell, and Alvin Epstein as Nagg. (Epstein portrayed Clov in the show’s 1958 New York debut at the Cherry Lane and was also Nagg in the 2008 BAM revival, with Elaine Stritch as Nell, Max Casella as Clov, and John Turturro as Hamm.)

After explaining, “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness,” one of the show’s most famous and enduring lines, Nell tells Nagg, “We laugh, with a will, in the beginning. But it’s always the same thing. Yes, it’s like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don’t laugh any more.” There are plenty of laughs in this version of Endgame, even as we may be edging closer and closer to the apocalypse.

JACK WAS KIND / SANDRA

Mary (Tracy Thorne) explains why she chose to just sit there in Jack Was Kind (photo by Carol Rosegg)

JACK WAS KIND
Irish Repertory Theatre, W. Scott McLucas Studio Theatre
132 West 22nd St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Wednesday – Sunday through December 18, $50
212-727-2737
irishrep.org

“How could I just sit there?” Mary asks at the beginning of Jack Was Kind, a one-woman show at the Irish Rep written by and starring Tracy Thorne. Thorne spends the entire seventy-minute show seated in a chair at a small table, relating critical choices she made to maintain the life she has; in fact, as the audience enters the downstairs W. Scott McLucas Studio Theatre, she’s already in place, deep in contemplation.

Meanwhile, over at the Vineyard Theatre, Marjan Neshat spends most of the eighty-minute, one-woman Sandra in a comfy easy chair, relating critical choices she made to get back at least part of the life she had. Both characters construct their own reality concerning a close male figure, with very different results, as one remains seated and the other takes to the road.

“Some people want me to stop . . . telling stories . . . to cease and desist,” Mary explains. “I don’t think those people will like this very much.” Married with two children, Mary is speaking into an iPhone, delivering a kind of public confession, or at least an explanation, of why she did what she did involving her husband, Jack, a famous, or, perhaps, infamous, public figure. On the table is a pile of photo albums, a reminder of their family life. Behind the table is a long, horizontal window that marks the passage of time as leaves blow gently in the wind. (The spare but effective set is by David Esler.)

Mary shares details of Jack’s life, as well as her own; her “beat up childhood” included sexual, psychological, and emotional abuse. She and Jack want only the best for their kids, Eli and Flo, but Flo in particular has issues with what her parents have done.

Tracy Thorne wrote and stars in one-woman show at the Irish Rep (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Mary tentatively admits, “Nearly two years of a nonsensically overpriced education results in our daughter having no observable intellectual curiosity, then boom, the match ignites, when it’s personal it ignites, and now she wants to know, but I don’t want her to know, I don’t know, though sometimes I wonder if I do, that’s a thing, right? ‘Really, Mom, you don’t know how you could just sit there?’ That’s what she says to me. So I guess this is how it starts for my daughter, maybe for me too, funny it starts at the end. But then I don’t know if it’s the end, or do I know if it’s the end, I don’t know what I know and now I’m threatening myself. ‘Don’t you think you should know, Mom.’ Frankly I’m appalled you don’t.’ She says that, too.”

The truth of what Jack did, and Mary’s complicity, slowly emerges; even if you guess it early on, the revelation is poignant, and timely. Thorne (Here We Are, Quick Bright Things), who was inspired by actual events and the writings of Elena Ferrante, delivers the monologue in a consistently even-paced manner, save for one loud moment; she’s trying to convince herself as much as her fictional virtual audience that she really couldn’t have done anything else, taking full advantage of her white privilege. Director Nicholas A. Cotz (My Name Is Gideon, rogerandtom) ensures that the play never gets boring; Thorne shifts in her seat, pauses, twiddles nearly incessantly with her hands, displaying how uncomfortable this whole situation is for her.

Jack Was Kind was first performed live on Zoom for several weeks during the pandemic, with each show followed by a discussion with a special guest. Essentially, home viewers were seeing Mary in her house, looking directly into her smartphone. At the Irish Rep, there’s a different kind of intimacy, as we watch Mary talking to the anonymous rabble on the other side of the camera. Physically, we are on her side, in the same space, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we are on her ethical side, especially as we discover who her husband is and what he did.

Marjan Neshat remains seated for much of one-woman Sandra at the Vineyard (photo by Carol Rosegg)

SANDRA
Vineyard Theatre
Gertrude and Irving Dimson Theatre
108 East 15th St. between Union Square East & Irving Pl.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 18, $37-$85
vineyardtheatre.org

Marjan Neshat caps off quite a year with Sandra, a one-woman show in which she spends most of the eighty-five minutes seated, telling her story directly to the audience. Last December, Neshat appeared in Sylvia Khoury’s Selling Kabul at Playwrights Horizons, followed by Sanaz Toossi’s English at the Atlantic and Wish You Were Here at Playwrights, a trio of unique and moving performances in which she displayed her range and proved herself to be a compelling stage presence.

David Cale’s world premiere at the Vineyard further solidifies Neshat’s standing as a rising star, even if she towers over the material. Wearing an attractive knee-length red dress and supremely unflattering sandals, Sandra Jones shares a Lifetime-worthy neo-noir about her best friend, Ethan, who has gone missing. (The costume is by Linda Cho.) Rachel Hauck’s imposing set features large standing walls on either side of Sandra’s chair, each with a big glassless window that she occasionally approaches, as if offering a way out. Behind her is a somewhat dilapidated wall with a grid of hundreds of fading small squares. It’s as if Sandra is trapped, both physically and psychologically, but egress is within reach.

A burgeoning pianist who works behind the counter at Sandra’s café in Crown Heights, Ethan has dinner with Sandra the night before going on vacation to Puerto Vallarta. She remembers, “At the door, I hugged him goodbye and he said, ‘I feel like disappearing from my life. Part of me just isn’t in the world. I’m at a remove.’ I said, ‘Even from me?’ ‘No, not you,’ he said, ‘But you and I are so simpatico, if I vanish you’d probably disappear from your life too. I love you, Sandra. I love you so much.’ I said, ‘I love you too, Ethan. Have fun in Mexico.’ We hugged again and he left.”

Their relationship is purely platonic, as Ethan is gay and Sandra is married, although she is separated from her husband. Two and a half weeks later, two detectives visit her, as Ethan has indeed disappeared and Sandra is his emergency contact. Determined to find him herself, she quickly packs up and flies south to investigate. She considers, “The first day in Puerto Vallarta my thoughts run the gamut . . . to thinking, maybe he’d planned this. And becoming furious with him. To stopping on the street and thinking, what the hell am I doing here?”

Marjan Neshat caps off quite a year with David Cale’s Sandra (photo by Carol Rosegg)

The audience might ask the same, as Sandra immerses herself in an ever-more-absurd plot involving a couple that frequents her café, bottles with messages being thrown into the ocean, a wild and sexy Italian named Luca Messina, a federal agent named Stephen McCourt who dismisses Sandra’s ideas, and various other characters, all of whom Sandra portrays with different accents. Even as the evidence mounts, Sandra feels in her gut that he’s still alive, so she continues playing Nancy Drew.

While watching Neshat makes the play worth seeing all by itself, the narrative, accompanied by music by Matthew Dean Marsh, careens downhill. After learning of some very dangerous doings in Cozumel, Sandra announces that she flew down there, and the audience groaned in unison. But it was not the kind of groan audiences make when a person decides to go down into the basement or up to the attic in a horror movie; this was a you-gotta-be-kidding-me scolding. However, even as we lose faith in Cale and Sandra, we just can’t give up on Neshat, especially when she finally takes off those terrible shoes.

As she did with Cale’s 2017 one-man Harry Clarke, in which an often-seated Billy Crudup excelled as the title character in a thrilling yarn, director Leigh Silverman (Grand Horizons, Chinglish) keeps us actively engaged despite the script’s ludicrousness. Obie winner Silverman knows her way around solo shows; she has also helmed the harrowing On the Exhale with Marin Ireland and the charming The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe with Cecily Strong.

At times you’re likely to ask yourself, “How could I just sit there?” But with such talented actors as Thorne and Neshat, the answer is simple.

CHESTER BAILEY

Real-life father and son Reed Birney and Ephraim Birney star in Chester Bailey at the Irish Rep (photo by Carol Rosegg)

CHESTER BAILEY
Irish Repertory Theatre, Francis J. Greenburger Mainstage
132 West 22nd St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Wednesday – Sunday through November 20, $50-$70
212-727-2737
irishrep.org

Chester Bailey is one of the best plays of the year, a pristine example of the beauty and power of live drama.

In January 2015, the Irish Rep presented a free staged reading of Emmy-nominated writer and producer Joseph Dougherty’s Chester Bailey at the DR2 Theatre, directed by Emmy and Tony nominee Ron Lagomarsino and featuring Tony nominee Reed Birney as a doctor caring for a young man (Noah Robbins) who has suffered extreme, unspeakable trauma.

The show has been transformed into a touching, gorgeous, must-see production, running at the Irish Rep through November 20. Birney stars as Dr. Philip Cotton, a specialist working with soldiers, including amputees, suffering from battle fatigue and “other injuries that might keep a man from getting back to the life he had as a civilian.” It’s 1945, near the end of WWII, and Dr. Cotton has accepted a position at a Long Island hospital named after Walt Whitman, the poet who served as a nurse during the Civil War.

“The families of the men I was treating wanted their sons and husbands to be the way they were before the Solomons and the Philippines,” Dr. Cotton tells us. “I tried. Tried to take that look out of their eyes. That look acquired in the jungle. My successes were ‘limited.’”

Dr. Cotton’s newest case is Chester Bailey — played by Birney’s son, Ephraim Birney — a man in his midtwenties who refuses to acknowledge that he has lost both eyes and hands in a horrific incident at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where he worked along the keel of a mine sweeper. Dr. Cotton might technically be unable to take that look out of Chester’s eyes, but the character is played with eyes and hands that are filled with emotion. Chester is overwhelmed with guilt because his parents got him the job in order to keep him out of the war; he had wanted to enlist, like most of the men he knew were doing, but his mother was determined to protect him.

Chester Bailey (Ephraim Birney) creates his own reality out of trauma in superb New York premiere (photo by Carol Rosegg)

“One night, I was reading the paper in the kitchen with the radio on, listening to the war news, and my folks came in and my mother was smiling,” he explains directly to the audience. “She said, ‘We’ve got a late Christmas present for you, Chester. Your father got you a job at the Navy Yards. Isn’t that wonderful?’ When she said job, she meant reserved occupation. She meant I wouldn’t be drafted because I’d be doing war work. Doing my patriotic part, but coming home to Vinegar Hill at the end of my shift. . . . My father looked up at me and I could see in his eyes this was just how it was going to be and there was nothing either one of us could do about it.” The horrible irony was that Chester ended up with the type of injuries men get on the field of battle anyway.

Chester has created a fantasy world in which he can still see and touch things. He describes in detail a copy of van Gogh’s Langlois Bridge at Arles that he thinks is hanging in his room. The 1888 painting relates to Chester’s state of mind: It depicts a woman in black standing on a small drawbridge under blue skies, holding a black umbrella as if in a dark storm. In the actual historical war, the bridge was blown up by the Germans in 1944, so it wouldn’t have existed in 1945 when Chester was supposedly seeing the print of it, made by an artist who would shortly thereafter cut off his own ear and live in an asylum. In fact, Chester believes that the only lasting effect the incident had on him was that he lost one ear. Meanwhile, we learn that Dr. Cotton is color blind, so he cannot process critical aspects of the painting that Chester believes is on the wall.

The first part of the play primarily goes back and forth between Chester and Dr. Cotton talking to the audience, delivering monologues about themselves. Chester discusses his parents and recalls going dancing with a former girlfriend at Luna Park, heading into Manhattan by himself for what he hoped would be a night of revelry, and falling instantly in love with a young red-haired woman selling papers at a newsstand in Penn Station.

Dr. Cotton carefully watches Chester sharing these memories, as if he’s not in the room with him, then adds elements from his own personal and professional life that intersect with similar themes that Chester’s deals with, just from a different angle; the doctor discusses his daughter, Ruthie; his wife’s infidelity and their eventual divorce; his career choices; going to the country club; his flirtation with his boss’s wife; and waiting at Penn Station to get home to Turtle Bay after work.

“It was difficult for Chester’s father to visit him on Long Island,” Dr. Cotton says. “He’d come on weekends, get off the train at the same station I used before I moved, walk the mile and a half around Holy Rood Cemetery to the hospital on Old Country Road. I think of him standing on the platform I used. Each of us waiting for the light of the westbound. Waiting. Not thinking. Trying not to think.”

In the second half, doctor and patient interact, as Dr. Cotton is determined to make Chester face what has happened to him and Chester keeps insisting he has eyes that can see and hands that can touch. Revisiting the incident, Chester tells his incorrect version. “Remember anything else?” Dr. Cotton says. “Nothing real,” Chester responds. “Do you remember anything that isn’t real?” the doctor asks before exploring Chester’s dreams and hallucinations.

The Irish Rep is justly celebrated for its sets, and Chester Bailey is no exception. Two-time Tony winner John Lee Beatty’s (Sweat, Junk) stage design combines a hospital room with bed, wheelchair, and table with the grandeur of old Penn Station, with stanchions in concrete blocks and a curved metal ceiling seemingly made out of railroad tracks. Brian MacDevitt’s lighting includes dangling lightbulbs that glow like stars in the night sky, going on forever in the mirrored walls. “The concourse of Penn Station is like the hull of a ship turned upside down, like you were looking up at the keel,” Chester says. “But instead of being all dark like where I work, it’s light. The light is just in the air. And there are no shadows. You want to know what the light looks like in heaven? You go to the main concourse of the Pennsylvania Station.” Beatty and MacDevitt have captured that image beautifully.

One of New York’s finest, most consistent actors, Reed Birney (The Humans, Man from Nebraska) inhabits the role from the very start, portraying Cotton not as a heroic wartime doctor but as a man with his own shortcomings. Whether he wants to or not, he becomes a kind of father figure to Chester, made all the more palpable since Ephraim (Exploits of Daddy B, Leon’s Fantasy Cut), who was cast first, is his son. While Reed moves slowly and carefully, Ephraim is much more active, jumping around with an eagerness that counters his character’s inability to come to terms with what has happened to him.

Two-time Drama Desk–nominated director Ron Lagomarsino (Digby, Driving Miss Daisy) guides the ninety-minute show with a graceful elegance; there’s nary a stray note in the play, which is not just about the travails of a single man but about family and everyday existence, about the big and small moments. The relationship between parents and their children are echoed here by a doctor and patient who happen to be father and son. At one point, Chester asks Dr. Cotton why he didn’t go into his father’s printing and binding company. “How come it wasn’t Cotton and Son?” he wonders. Dr. Cotton answers, “He wanted me to go to college. I wanted to be a doctor.” It takes on extra meaning in that Ephraim has followed his father and mother, actress Constance Shulman, into the family business. (All three appeared in the offbeat 2022 film Strawberry Mansion.)

Early on, Dr. Cotton states, “If there’s one thing reality can’t tolerate, it’s competition.” It’s a great line in a great play that brilliantly explores the human condition and the realities that each of us creates to help us deal with whatever life throws our way.

THE BUTCHER BOY

Nicholas Barasch sparkles as Francie Brady in world premiere musical at the Irish Rep (photo by Carol Rosegg)

THE BUTCHER BOY
Irish Repertory Theatre, Francis J. Greenburger Mainstage
132 West 22nd St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Wednesday – Sunday through September 11, $50-$70
212-727-2737
irishrep.org

Five years ago, high school senior Asher Muldoon came to the Irish Rep with a musical adaptation of Patrick McCabe’s award-winning 1992 novel, The Butcher Boy, about thirteen-year-old Francie Brady (Nicholas Barasch), a red-haired lad on a destructive path to do some very bad things in the village of Clones in County Monaghan in the mid-1960s. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the novel was turned into a well-received 1997 dark comedy by Neil Jordan starring Stephen Rea, Fiona Shaw, Brendan Gleeson, Milo O’Shea, and Sinéad O’Connor. Muldoon’s show opened last night at the Irish Rep, the first new musical developed by the company in eight years. Unfortunately, it could use some slicing and dicing; while the narrative parts work well, the musical numbers don’t bring home the bacon.

Nicholas Barasch is terrific as Francie Brady, a neighborhood bully from a dysfunctional family; he narrates the story in a series of flashbacks, disconcertingly oblivious to the full weight of his actions. “When I was a young lad twenty or thirty or forty years ago I lived in a small town where they were all after me on account of what I done on Missus Nugent,” he says at the beginning. “Now, it started with Joe and me out at the hide we had built. ‘Death to all dogs who enter here!’ we said. Except us of course.”

Francie’s mother, Annie (Andrea Lynn Green), suffers from severe depression, and his father, Ben (Scott Stangland), is a nasty alcoholic and failed trumpet player. Francie’s uncle, Alo (Joe Cassidy), his father’s brother, left his girlfriend, Mary (Kerry Conte), without saying goodbye, to try his luck in London. He comes to a party as a conquering hero until the two siblings have a bit of a contentious row.

Francie hangs around with his best friend, Joe Purcell (Christian Strange), fishing; seeking to create mayhem; doing whatever he can to obtain his favorite candy, Flash Bars; and bullying Phillip (Daniel Marconi), Mrs. Nugent’s (Michele Ragusa) nerdy son, stealing his treasured comic books. “Oh, if we lived like this forever we’d be fine / So why can’t we live like this forever?” Francie and Joe sing.

Upset at Francie’s treatment of Phillip, Mrs. Nugent visits Mrs. Brady and complains, “I’ll tell you something, Annie, it’s no wonder your boy is such a mean little runt. His father lying round in bars morning to midnight, a disgrace to the family, to the whole town, he’s no better than a pig. A PIG.” Francie, as narrator, tells the audience, “She didn’t know what she was doing then, Mrs. Nugent.” Mrs. Nugent then adds, “Pigs! Sure the whole town knows it. PIGS!!!”

Four pigs spur Francie Brady (Nicholas Barasch) to do bad things in The Butcher Boy (photo by Carol Rosegg)

The “pigs” comments get to Francie, who does not want to be seen as inferior to anyone. He soon finds himself accompanied by four imaginary pigs (Teddy Trice, Carey Rebecca Brown, Polly McKie, and David Baida), a quartet of adults wearing pig masks and goading him on. “Well, I’ll be damned if I let all those piggies take what’s mine / This town ain’t big enough for both of us, you filthy swine / Let’s open up an abattoir and / Drain their blood for boudin noir / Save room for sausage,” one of the pigs sings. The four then chime in together, “Cause those big fat piggies have too much to say / Show em we’re not afraid to go to war / Unless those pigs grow piggy wings and fly away / Within a day or two you won’t know who is you and who is piggy.”

Francie runs away to Dublin (using the elegant pseudonym Algernon Carruthers), believing, “We can all just stay together / And I know that we’ll be fine / And the world will be back where the world is supposed to be,” but he winds up back in Clones with his family, gets a job working for Mr. Leddy (Baida) the butcher (“I’m used to seeing pigs,” Francie says), and has to redefine his place in a community where everyone seems to have grown up around him but he has stayed the same. It doesn’t go well.

Directed by Irish Rep cofounder Ciarán O’Reilly (Autumn Royal, The Emperor Jones), The Butcher Boy is an intense look into the mind of a troubled teen whose dark fantasies lure him away from reality. The show begins on Charlie Corcoran’s superb set, a kind of confined hideout with wooden slats at the right and left side covered in colorful comic-book regalia and a large, old-fashioned black-and-white television screen in the back, where Francie watches The Lone Ranger, Captain Z-Ro, and The Twilight Zone, including clips from the famous TZ episode “It’s a Good Life,” in which Bill Mumy portrays a young boy with special powers that allow him to control every part of life — and death — in a small town (“You’re a bad man! You’re a very bad man!”). During intermission, the classic “Eye of the Beholder” episode is shown, in which Rod Serling asks, “What kind of world where ugliness is the norm and beauty the deviation from that norm?” The pig masks are reminiscent of two TZ episodes, but the musical overdoes the comparisons by having Phillip morph into Serling during an otherwise harrowing scene.

There are also references to John F. Kennedy, America’s first Irish-Catholic president, who was almost brought down by the Bay of Pigs invasion, and three iterations of women named Mary, all played by Conte, a clever melding of the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene, a trio of characters who intrigue Francie.

Francie’s descent into mental illness is both heartbreaking and frightening, particularly as the United States is involved in a wide-ranging discussion about mental health, especially as it relates to disturbed young white males who are prone to mass shootings. Barasch (Hadestown, She Loves Me) walks the fine line of Francie’s sanity with an infectious charm even though we know that things are going to get bloody at any moment; his smile, and bright red hair, lights up the room.

However, the musical numbers (“Big Fat Piggies!,” “My Lovelies,” “Francie Gets Mad,” “Don’t Forget About Me”), featuring limited, tongue-in-cheek choreography by Barry McNabb, actually detract from the story; they feel tacked on, like garnish, merely extending the show to a too-long two hours and twenty minutes (with intermission). I found myself rooting for them to end, like television commercials, so I could get back to the regularly scheduled program, which I was otherwise immersed in, enjoying thoroughly.

Muldoon, who is currently an undergrad at Princeton, wrote the book, music, and lyrics; the score is performed by the Slaughterhouse Five, consisting of conductor and musical director David Hancock Turner on keyboards, Danielle Giulini on violin, Joseph Wallace on bass, Martha Hyde on reeds, and Mike Rosengarten on guitar and banjo, playing behind the television screen, only occasionally visible.

The Butcher Boy could have used some more tenderizing and trimming before being served, as it has the promise of being one delicious meal where audiences wouldn’t mind making pigs of themselves.

BELFAST GIRLS

Five women believe they are on their way to a better life in Belfast Girls (photo by Carol Rosegg)

BELFAST GIRLS
Irish Repertory Theatre, Francis J. Greenburger Mainstage
132 West 22nd St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Wednesday – Sunday through June 26, $50-$70
212-727-2737
irishrep.org

“From now on on this ship we’re to be mistresses of our own destiny,” Judith Noone declares early in Belfast Girls, which opened tonight at the Irish Rep. Moments later, she adds, “Youse think the English poor are any better off than us? They’re not. An’ besides, we’re women. An’ we’ll never be anythin’ here. For we are as the peat; to be used up an’ walked on.”

During the Great Famine, also known as the Great Starvation, the Orphan Emigration Scheme was put into effect in Ireland by British secretary of state for the colonies Earl Grey, purportedly to send young, parentless Irish girls (nineteen and under) who had been toiling in overcrowded workhouses to a better life in Australia. Between 1848 and 1850, more than four thousand women made the treacherous months-long journey by ship; however, many of them were not orphans but older prostitutes who had been soliciting on the streets. Their occupation would be quite a surprise to the Australian men who were supposed to be waiting for them with open arms on the shores of the faraway continent.

London-born Irish playwright Jaki McCarrick tells the fictionalized story of one such harrowing trip in Belfast Girls, making its New York City debut at the Irish Rep through June 26. It’s 1850, and the Inchinnan, the name of a real ship, is about to set sail. Four Catholic girls from Belfast have been assigned a small room with two bunks, Judith (Caroline Strange), Hannah Gibney (Mary Mallen), Ellen Clarke (Labhaoise Magee), and Sarah Jane Wylie (Sarah Street). At first, it’s like a dorm room at a girls school, one none of them would have been able to afford. They poke fun at one another while also hoping for a different future than the one they had been destined for.

When Hannah and Ellen take an immediate liking to the (unseen) attractive male cook, Judith, the most no-nonsense of the group, tells them to stay away from the men onboard. “All a youse, get your heads round the plain fact we’re leavin’ an’ we won’t ever be comin’ back,” she says. “Look, I know some of youse an’ youse know me. We have this one an’ only chance. An’ in all the kingdom of Ireland aren’t we — us women — aren’t we damned lucky to be gettin’ out of it?”

Molly (Aida Leventaki), Judith (Caroline Strange), and Hannah (Mary Mallen) take a break on board the Inchinnan (photo by Carol Rosegg)

A few moments later, Hannah says, “I hear there’s fine English farmers in the colony with thousands of acres, Judith, an’ more cattle than ya could dream of seein’ in the whole of Ireland, just drippin’ wit need for female companionship.” Ellen responds, “I want no damn Englishman. Haven’t they been trouble enough in this country? Why in the name a god would I travel halfways across the earth ta find one of them when every self-respectin’ Irishman is tryin’ to get them outta the place?”

Hannah, Sarah, and Judith are none-too-pleased when Ellen, who had gone for a walk, comes back with Molly Durcan (Aida Leventaki), a whisper-thin maidservant from the much wealthier county of Sligo who will be staying with them as well. Hannah is suspicious of Molly, but the five women attempt to bond through a terrible storm and some surprising revelations. And for good measure, McCarrick adds an Irish ghost story and several traditional folksongs.

In Belfast Girls, McCarrick (Leopoldville, The Naturalists) takes on such issues as class, gender, and religion, adding a dose of Marxism, all seen through a feminist lens as the women contemplate what’s next for them. They talk a lot about what was considered women’s responsibilities a hundred and seventy years ago: being a maidservant, sewing adornments on bonnets, not learning how to read, existing primarily as birthing vessels.

“When I arrive in the Colony what choice do I have only to work as I always worked?” Sarah asks. Molly answers, “But you do have choices. There are groups starting all over the world. Where women stand up and talk and demand the privileges only men have now; to be paid as men are paid, to be allowed to do the same things — to tour in a theatrical, for instance, without people thinking you’re loose or worse.” Molly has dreams of being an actress, perhaps playing Puck in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a character who, as Robin Goodfellow in the play within the play, says, “Lord, what fools these mortals be! . . . Follow my voice: we’ll try no manhood here.” But all five of the women are acting, adapting their personas, and toying with the truth, in order to get away from their miserable lives.

Judith (Caroline Strange), Ellen (Labhaoise Magee), and Hannah (Mary Mallen) contemplate their future in Belfast Girls (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Director Nicola Murphy (A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, Pumpgirl) keeps a fast pace and steady ship as controversies ensue and truths come out. Chika Shimizu’s two-story set is like a kind of liminal prison for the women, cramped in a room with no windows. China Lee’s costumes emphasize the type of restrictive clothing women had to wear at that time. Caroline Eng’s sound puts the audience on the water, birds chirping outside, tempting freedom. The only male member of the primary cast and crew is lighting designer Michael O’Connor.

The cast is exemplary, led by Strange (London Assurance, Meditations on a Magnetic North) as the Jamaican-born mixed-race Judith; her last name, Noone, might imply that she is “no one,” but she is a force to be reckoned with, unafraid to defend her decisions in a patriarchal society. “We didn’t leave Ireland at all, ladies,” Judith declares. “Ireland has spat us out.” The Orphan Emigration Scheme ended in 1850, but the battle for women’s rights in Ireland continues.

TWO BY SYNGE: IN THE SHADOW OF THE GLEN / THE TINKER’S WEDDING

The Irish Rep’s Two by Synge features several musical interludes (photo by Carol Rosegg)

TWO BY SYNGE: IN THE SHADOW OF THE GLEN / THE TINKER’S WEDDING
Irish Repertory Theatre, W. Scott McLucas Studio Theatre
132 West 22nd St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Wednesday – Sunday through May 22, $50
212-727-2737
irishrep.org

I am here to sing — pun intended — the praises of the great John Keating, currently starring in the theatrical twinbill Two by Synge: In the Shadow of the Glen & The Tinker’s Wedding at the Irish Rep. It’s a rave long in coming. If you don’t know the name, you must not have visited the Irish Rep much in the last quarter century, during which time the Tipperary native has appeared in more than a dozen productions (as well as numerous Shakespeare adaptations at TFANA).

Keating, a wiry fellow who stands six-foot-three with wildly curly hair and an immediately recognizable face, portrayed the fearful, deeply religious Shawn Keogh in John Millington Synge’s Playboy of the Western World at the Irish Rep in 2002; he is not the same John Keating who illustrated a 1927 edition of the work.

Directed by Irish Rep founding artistic director Charlotte Moore, Two by Synge consists of a pair of early short works about Irish peasantry, which the Dublin-born Synge based on stories he heard and saw, then wrote about at the urging of his friend and colleague W. B. Yeats. They take place in the company’s downstairs W. Scott McLucas Studio Theatre, a tiny, intimate black box where you can practically reach out and touch the actors — while getting the sensational opportunity to revel in Keating’s extraordinary talent.

It begins with The Tinker’s Wedding, Synge’s bawdy tale of a poor couple, Sarah Casey (Jo Kinsella), the onetime Beauty of Ballinacree, and Michael Byrne (Keating), a tinker, who want to get married. Their relationship is more out of necessity than true love.

A couple of peasants want the local priest to marry them in The Tinker’s Wedding (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Sarah harasses Michael, arguing, “It’ll be small joy for yourself if you aren’t ready with my wedding ring. Is it near done this time, or what way is it at all?” He replies, “A poor way only, Sarah Casey, for it’s the divil’s job making a ring, and you’ll be having my hands destroyed in a short while the way I’ll not be able to make a tin can at all maybe at the dawn of day.” Sarah says, “If it’s the divil’s job, let you mind it, and leave your speeches that would choke a fool.” Michael retorts, “And it’s you’ll go talking of fools, Sarah Casey, when no man did ever hear a lying story even of your like unto this mortal day. You to be going beside me a great while, and rearing a lot of them, and then to be setting off with your talk of getting married, and your driving me to it, and I not asking it at all.”

Sarah tries to force the local priest (Sean Gormley) to perform the ceremony, but he is not about to do so without getting some form of payment, as Sarah and Michael are not church regulars and she does not live the life of a model Christian. “A holy pair, surely! Let you get out of my way,” the harried priest declares, attempting to leave them, but Sarah is adamant. Soon arriving is Michael’s mother, Mary (Terry Donnelly), a well-known drunk who has a way of ruining everything. She tells the priest, “Isn’t it a grand thing to see you sitting down, with no pride in you, and drinking a sup with the like of us, and we the poorest, wretched, starving creatures you’d see any place on the earth?” When the priest threatens again to not marry the couple, Sarah and Michael come up with a bizarre plan to ensure their union.

The Tinker’s Wedding — which Synge never got to see performed, as he died of Hodgkin’s lymphoma at the age of thirty-seven, more than seven months before its 1909 debut — is a bit too jumbled at first but eventually finds its legs. Daniel Geggatt’s set features stone walls, a fireplace, a small gate, and the facade of a house that resembles a huge Native American drum. Keating is a joy to watch, whether he is front and center or drifting off into the background, tinkering with the ring or a tin can. In full character, he follows the action with intricate gestures, from smiles and nods of agreement to frowns and head shakes. His eyes gape open in wonder and shudder in fear. While that might be what good acting is about, he takes it to another level, in the simplest moments as well as the turning points.

Keating (The Naturalists, The Winter’s Tale) is even better in the second play, the significantly superior In the Shadow of the Glen, the first of Synge’s works to be staged (in 1903). Keating plays a tramp in a shoddy coat (courtesy of costume designer David Toser) who has wandered in from a storm to seek temporary shelter in the home of Nora Burke (Kinsella) and her husband, Dan (Gormley), who is lying lifeless in the bed. (The set is essentially the same save for the “drum,” which has been rotated to reveal the bedroom.) She seems relatively nonplussed by the corpse, and the tramp is taken aback.

“It’s a queer look is on him for a man that’s dead,” the tramp points out. Nora responds, “He was always queer, stranger, and I suppose them that’s queer and they living men will be queer bodies after.” The tramp adds, “Isn’t it a great wonder you’re letting him lie there, and he is not tidied, or laid out itself?” She answers, “I was afeard, stranger, for he put a black curse on me this morning if I’d touch his body the time he’d die sudden, or let any one touch it except his sister only, and it’s ten miles away she lives in the big glen over the hill.” Tramp: “It’s a queer story he wouldn’t let his own wife touch him, and he dying quiet in his bed.” Nora: “I’m thinking many would be afeard, but I never knew what way I’d be afeard of beggar or bishop or any man of you at all. It’s other things than the like of you, stranger, would make a person afeard.”

The tropes of a classic ghost story turn on a fabulous plot twist and the arrival of the Burkes’ neighbor, young farmer Micheal Dara (Ciaran Bowling) — the character Keating played in his first professional performance in 1994 — in whom Nora sees a rescuer from her sudden predicament. “What way would I live and I an old woman if I didn’t marry a man with a bit of a farm, and cows on it, and sheep on the back hills?” she asks.

A tramp finds himself caught between a young farmer (Ciaran Bowling) and a woman (Jo Kinsella) mourning her husband in J. M. Synge’s In the Shadow of the Glen (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Keating (Autumn Royal, The O’Casey Cycle) is again magnificent in Glen, his body movements and shifting of his eyes utterly hypnotizing. He is an actor’s actor, making everyone around him better; watching him watching the other characters also offers another way into the play for the audience, no matter how successful it already is, and In the Shadow of the Glen is just that, a short but satisfying foray into the fear of death that hovers over Irish stories. Moore (The Streets of New York, The Playboy of the Western World) and lighting designer Michael O’Connor makes sure to never have Keating fade too far into the background as members of the rest of the fine cast take center stage.

The two shows, which total seventy-five minutes, also include six songs, two by Synge, three traditionals, and one original by Gormley, “A Smile upon My Face,” which comes between the two comedies. Yes, despite such lines as “It’s a cruel and a wicked thing to be bred poor,” said by Sarah Casey, Two by Synge is very funny.

In his preface to The Tinker’s Wedding, the playwright explained, “The drama is made serious — in the French sense of the word — not by the degree in which it is taken up with problems that are serious in themselves, but by the degree in which it gives the nourishment, not very easy to define, on which our imaginations live. We should not go to the theatre as we go to a chemist’s, or a dram-shop, but as we go to a dinner, where the food we need is taken with pleasure and excitement. . . . Of the things which nourish the imagination humour is one of the most needful, and it is dangerous to limit or destroy it. Baudelaire calls laughter the greatest sign of the Satanic element in man; and where a country loses its humor, as some towns in Ireland are doing, there will be morbidity of mind, as Baudelaire’s mind was morbid. In the greater part of Ireland, however, the whole people, from the tinkers to the clergy, have still a life, and view of life, that are rich and genial and humorous. I do not think that these country people, who have so much humor themselves, will mind being laughed at without malice, as the people in every country have been laughed at in their own comedies.”

Whenever you’re not sure if something is funny or not, just follow Keating’s lead and he’ll make sure you’re on the right path.

THE STREETS OF NEW YORK

Irish Rep revival of The Streets of New York shines a light on greed, poverty, and the power of love (photo by Carol Rosegg)

THE STREETS OF NEW YORK
Irish Repertory Theatre, Francis J. Greenburger Mainstage
132 West 22nd St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Wednesday – Sunday through January 30, $50-$70
212-727-2737
irishrep.org

As the pandemic lockdown lifted and the city opened back up, Irish Rep artistic director Charlotte Moore decided to revisit the company’s 2002 hit, The Streets of New York. “In this time of Covid, I was sure it would be appropriate to rewrite my original director’s note,” Moore explains in the program. “But upon rereading the original, so many things are exactly the same that I have changed my mind. There is still great poverty and hunger, and the heartbreak of lost love never changes. Add to that a worldwide pandemic and a masked society and Boucicault’s eighteenth-century world seems to fit right into our twenty-first with its darkness and restrictions.”

Moore adapted Dublin-born Dion Boucicault’s 1857 play The Poor of New York, itself based on Édouard Louis Alexandre Brisebarre’s Les Pauvres de Paris, adding more than a dozen songs to the Dickensian tale of greed and hardship. The result is a delightful, indelible tale that feels just right for this moment in time, one that I can envision becoming an annual holiday tradition.

The show begins on the eve of the Panic of 1837, which led to an economic depression. “The poor man’s home is a filthy street / You sell your shoes for a scrap of meat,” a man sings. An older couple adds, “The violence of poverty breeds everywhere / And a cloud of injustice hangs in the air/ And till it clears / It could be years / But till it clears / We must survive / And stay alive / On these unholy, shadowy, crime ridden, black hearted, / Blood sodden, filthy, mean / Streets of New York!”

Wealthy banker Gideon Bloodgood (David Hess) is preparing to abscond with his Nassau St. bank’s money when sea captain Patrick Fairweather (Daniel J. Maldonado) arrives after hours to entrust Bloodgood with his life savings before going on a voyage, seeking the banker’s protection of the financial security of his wife and two children. Fairweather departs but returns moments later, changing his mind and demanding his fortune back. But the greedy Bloodgood is not about to surrender his newfound gains, and when Fairweather suddenly drops dead, Bloodgood decides to dump the body and keep the money — but not before one of his clerks, Brendan Badger (Justin Keyes), grabs the signed deposit receipt, hiding it away for a rainy day.

The Puffy family (Polly McKie, Richard Henry, and Jordan Tyson) find a way to smile amid their drudgery in The Streets of New York (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Twenty years later, Bloodgood, accompanied by his ever-faithful butler, Edwards (Price Waldman), is basking in his vast success, built on the cash he stole from Fairweather. While Bloodgood is looking for a suitable husband for his spoiled daughter, Alida (Amanda Jane Cooper), Fairweather’s children, Lucy (DeLaney Westfall) and Paul (Ryan Vona), and widow, Susan (Amy Bodnar), are living in abject poverty in the dangerous area of New York City known as Five Points. Their poor but goodhearted landlord, Dermot Puffy (Richard Henry), has fallen behind on his mortgage payments, so the heartless Bloodgood threatens to evict Puffy, his wife, Dolly (Polly McKie), and their daughter, Dixie (Jordan Tyson), which would leave the Fairweathers homeless as well.

The Fairweathers hope to be saved by Lucy’s childhood love, Mark Livingstone (Ben Jacoby), scion of a well-heeled, prosperous society family, while Alida plots to marry Mark herself to restore the Bloodgood name to respectability even as she fools around with the philandering Duke Vlad (Maldonado). Like her father, it’s only money and appearances that matter. “Isn’t it wonderful to be in control / Who cares if Daddy has to sell his soul / To keep me in accoutrements / To keep me in the things I want / To keep me happy,” Alida selfishly admits. “Allowed to be horrid and rude to everyone / A sense of entitlement is so much fun / I ride whilst poorer people walk, (with a frown) or run! / Oh! How I love being rich!”

As Christmas approaches, some are destined to be showered with yet more wealth while others seem bound for anonymity, struggling to survive day by day in the perilous gutters of an uncaring metropolis. The very best kind of mustache-twirling melodrama ensues as the plot leaps and twists to its conclusion.

Robber baron Gideon Bloodgood (David Hess) and his obnoxious daughter (Amanda Jane Cooper) boss around their butler (Price Waldman) in The Streets of New York (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Moore, who with Irish Rep producing director Ciarán O’Reilly created some of the most compelling and innovative online shows during the pandemic, goes back to the basics with The Streets of New York. Linda Fisher’s period costumes feel authentic, and Hugh Landwehr’s set, covered with giant bills and help wanted ads, is centered by a large wall that the actors and masked staff members move around, magically morphing into the Bloodgoods’ opulent home and office as well as doomed tenements in Five Points.

The five-piece orchestra is partially visible offstage right, consisting of Melanie Mason on cello, Jeremy Clayton on woodwinds, Karen Lindquist on harp, Sean Murphy on bass, and Joel Lambdin on violin, performing lovely orchestrations by music director Mark Hartman and associate conductor Yasuhiko Fukuoka.

Two-time Tony nominee Moore, who previously directed Boucicault’s London Assurance in addition to plays by O’Casey, Yeats, Friel, and Synge and such musicals as Meet Me in St. Louis and Love, Noël: The Letters and Songs of Noël Coward, gives ample room for the material, which often evokes operetta, to breathe on the cramped stage, the two and a half hours (with intermission) never slowing down for a minute. Moore’s lyrics do what they’re supposed to, help develop the narrative and give depth to the characters; nary a word is extraneous. Barry McNabb’s choreography shines in the vaudevillian duet “Villains,” a riotous showstopper featuring Hess and Keyes. Cooper brings down the house in her engaging solo, “Oh, How I Love Being Rich,” her obnoxious coquettishness channeling Bernadette Peters and Kristen Chenoweth. (She’s worked onstage with Chenoweth several times.) Hess stands out as the scoundrel Bloodgood, reveling in his egomaniacal affairs, while Jacoby is heart-wrenching as a man who just wants to do the right thing but is thwarted at every turn.

Still caught up in a pandemic and social justice movement that have magnified the sorry state of income inequality in America, The Streets of New York doesn’t feel old-fashioned as much as fresh and prescient. We all want a “taste of the good life,” as the Puffys explain, but it’s not always within reach. However, the power of love — and a delightful musical — has the ability to transcend suffering and bring light to lead us out