Tag Archives: Irish Repertory Theatre

AUTUMN ROYAL

Life is not exactly looking up for Timmy (John Keating) and May (Maeve Higgins) in Autumn Royal (photo by Carol Rosegg)

AUTUMN ROYAL
Irish Repertory Theatre, Francis J. Greenburger Mainstage
132 West 22nd St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through November 21, $50-$70
212-727-2737
irishrep.org

It was with a bittersweet wistfulness that I entered the Irish Rep for the first time in more than a year and a half. During the pandemic lockdown, the company was at the global forefront of digital theater, presenting more than a dozen outstanding livestreamed and recorded shows online, using cutting-edge technology that went far beyond Zoom boxes and clumsy green-screening. (Among the best were The Weir, Bill Irwin’s On Beckett / In Screen, and The Cordelia Dream; twelve of the shows are still available on demand.) Of course, I was excited to be back at the Francis J. Greenburger Mainstage on West Twenty-Second St. for a matinee, greeted by masked founding directors Charlotte Moore and Ciarán O’Reilly as I made my way in to sit with an audience of real people rather than virtual avatars Zooming in from home.

The Irish Rep has brilliantly reopened with the North American premiere of Kevin Barry’s Autumn Royal, a charming two-character, seventy-minute dark comedy that takes place on a claustrophobic set, an oddly appropriate reminder of the lockdown. The walls seem to be closing in on May (Maeve Higgins) and Timothy (John Keating), a pair of thirtysomething siblings who are caregivers for their ailing father, who lives upstairs in the attic. Charlie Corcoran’s set consists of a small table, two chairs, a doorway leading out of the house, and stairs to the attic, which appear ridiculously small and narrow, practically untenable. It’s as if May and Timmy are trapped, not only in their quaint Cork City home, but in the past, still reeling from their mother’s sudden departure when they were young. (“Went out for a packet o’ Birds custard and never came back,” Timmy recalls.)

Timmy dreams of moving to Australia to become a surfer, while May is much more realistic in their lack of options. She counters his talk of riding a wave with a detailed description of a local woman whose mother fell into a fireplace and “half the face melted off her.” It’s as if they’re fire and water, opposites who need each other.

Their father is never seen — it’s like he’s quarantining — but is occasionally heard, and every once in a while he bangs on the floor, sending dust and crumbling parts of the ceiling down on his grown children, who are not particularly fond of a poem he is writing about a duck walking across a puddle. However, the three of them bond over the 1982 song “Zoom” by Fat Larry’s Band, which Timmy blasts from an old boombox, on cassette. (Yes, even the name of the song evokes virtual theater, even though the play was first performed in Cork in 2017.)

May and Timmy share memories with little thought of their future. “I remember fucking everything,” May proclaims. A moment later, she adds, “We’re never going to get past ourselves here, Tim.” Timmy replies, “I’m definitely going to Australia, May. All I need is to have, like, two grand, I think is it?, in the, am . . .” She shoots back, “Timmy? You’re not going to make it as far as the Esso station.”

A haunting darkness hovers over a sister and brother in Irish drama (photo by Carol Rosegg)

They start to believe that their lives might be different if they put their father in a nursing home, but whenever they start thinking about how things can improve, their discussions turn sour. “All we’re doin’ now is talkin’ ourselves into a very dark read o’ things, yunno?” Timmy says. “Ah, the world sometimes is just complete . . . fucken . . . bollocks, like,” May opines. No matter which way they turn, regardless of their desires, they just seem to end up stuck back at home, their parents practically ghosts haunting their lives.

Directed by O’Reilly (The Weir, The Emperor Jones) with a deft touch, Autumn Royal features projections by Dan Scully, sometimes of blood covering a wall, while others evoke the siblings as kids in the back of a car on a Sunday drive to Tipperary, a beach scene, the silhouette of a mysterious woman, white picture frames, and, repeatedly, a loud washing machine, the spin cycle representing the inner chaos and repetition of their existence, just going around in circles. Keating (The O’Casey Cycle, Pericles) — a true New York theater treasure — and Higgins (Extra Ordinary, Naked Camera) deliver a terrific one-two punch as the arguing siblings, he tall, gangly, and comical, she short, tough, and harder-edged. They each get long monologues, but they really shine when they are both onstage, playing off each other like a classic comedy team, one goofy and wide-eyed, the other harshly direct and to the point. In his first stage work, novelist and short story writer Barry (Beatlebone, City of Bohane) adds a healthy dose of Irish doom and gloom to a common situation, one that hits a little closer to home in the time of Covid.

THE CORDELIA DREAM: A PERFORMANCE ON SCREEN

Danielle Ryan and Stephen Brennan are exceptional as a bitter daughter and father in streaming revival of Marina Carr’s The Cordelia Dream

THE CORDELIA DREAM
Irish Rep Online
Daily through August 8, suggested donation $25
irishrep.org

Summer theater in New York City is dominated by outdoor Shakespeare presentations, including Shakespeare in the Parking Lot’s Two Noble Kinsmen, the Classical Theatre of Harlem’s Seize the King, the Public Theater’s Merry Wives of Windsor at the Delacorte and the Mobile Unit’s Shakespeare: Call and Response, and NY Classical’s King Lear with a happy ending.

One of the best productions is taking place indoors, but not in a theater with an audience. I wouldn’t be giving anything away if I told you that there is no happy ending in the Irish Rep’s virtual revival of Marina Carr’s The Cordelia Dream, streaming online through August 8. The brutal, relentless two-act, ninety-minute play was commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company and debuted in 2008 at Wilton’s Music Hall in London. Charlotte Moore and Ciarán O’Reilly of the Irish Rep, in association with casting director and producer Bonnie Timmermann, enlisted director Joe O’Byrne to helm a new version filmed at the New Theatre in Dublin, as part of the innovative company’s continuing onscreen works made during the pandemic.

The play takes place in a dark, eerie room where an elderly man (Stephen Brennan) lives alone, drinking by himself and playing his piano. He is visited one day by his long-estranged daughter (Danielle Ryan); they have not seen each other in many years, and their discomfort and hostility are immediately apparent in their initial exchange.

Man: You.
Woman: Yes. Me.
Man: Well.
Woman: It wasn’t easy . . . seeking you out.
Man: Wasn’t it?
Woman: I stayed away as long as I could.
Man: You think I’m going to die soon?
Woman: Maybe.
Man: You want to kiss and make up before the event?
Woman: Some people visit each other all the time.
Man: I’m not some people. You of all people should know that.
Woman: Can I come in or not?

There is no love lost between father and daughter; it’s as if an older Cordelia has come to see her aging father, both filled with resentment, no reconciliation in sight. “Love needs a streak of darkness. The day is for solitude. Morning especially. Morning is for death,” he says. “And afternoons?” she asks. “At your age they’re for transgressions, at mine they’re for remorse,” he replies. “You know about remorse?” she wonders. “I’m an expert on it,” he answers.

Both characters are revealed as cold and cruel as details of their lives emerge in the corrosive conversation. He is an extremely talented but failed composer attempting to create his magnum opus before he dies, while she is a famous composer who has not been able to enjoy her success. He accuses her of wasting her gifts, claiming his superiority, unashamed of his hatred of her. He is glad that none of her children are named after him; he even criticizes the wine she brought. “You are very mediocre,” he declares. “Does mediocre need ‘very’ in front of it?” she asks. “When talking about you. Yes, it does,” he replies with bitterness.

She is there to say her piece, not about to cower from him. “You haven’t left me alone,” she says. “You’ve retreated to this sulphurous corner to gather venom for the next assault. You? Leave me alone? You haunt me.”

She has also come to tell him about a dream she has had, about their life and death, about the four howls and the five “never”s in Shakespeare’s grand tragedy. “You think you’re Cordelia to my Lear. No, my dear. You’re more Regan and Goneril spun,” he spits at her. “And you’re no Lear,” she shoots back, soon leaving.

She returns five years later, but it is not quite the same. His mental faculties are decreasing, not unlike the mad Lear’s, thinking her to be the goat-faced, dog-hearted dark lady of his nightmares, a reference to the character Shakespeare addresses in Sonnet 130 and others, whom he loves but cannot outright compliment, disparaging her instead. He recalls moments from his past but is foggy. “Your self-delusion is complete,” she says. “Men should not have daughters,” he opines. The acerbic cat-and-mouse dialogue continues as they eviscerate each other till nothing’s left.

Fiercely directed by Joe O’Byrne (McKeague and O’Brien present “The Rising,” Frank Pig Says Hello), The Cordelia Dream is a merciless, unyielding depiction of an unredeemable relationship between a father and daughter. With biting language, Carr (Woman and Scarecrow, Marble) brilliantly compares the creation of a work of art to the birth of a child and all the responsibilities that are supposed to accompany it. The play is intimately photographed and edited by Emmy winner Nick Ryan, with ghostly set design by Robert Ballagh and sound and original music by Emmy nominee David Downes, the actors naturally lit by a few lamps and a window that offers brief reprieves from the enveloping darkness that makes it feel like it is all a dream.

Brennan (A Life, The Pinter Landscape) commands the screen with an immense presence, his white-haired, white-bearded character skewering his daughter with relish, unafraid of any consequences. Ryan (Harry Wild, Wild Mountain Thyme), who made her professional debut in 2007 playing Cordelia and Brigitte in the Edinburgh Fringe award winner Food, portrays the lost woman with a graceful finesse as she tries to unburden herself of the many ways she claims he destroyed her life. The harrowing work hits even deeper at a time when loved ones are reuniting after the long pandemic lockdown, with hugs and kisses, smiles of relief and unabashed joy, none of which is evident in these two characters who harbor a disturbing, apparently unsalvageable history.

LITTLE GEM: A PERFORMANCE ON SCREEN

Who: Marsha Mason, Brenda Meaney, Lauren O’Leary
What: Virtual play reading
Where: #IrishRepOnline
When: April 27 – May 9, free with RSVP (suggested donation $25)
Why: The Irish Rep continues its outstanding productions made during the pandemic lockdown with a virtual reading of Elaine Murphy’s Little Gem. The show is a reunion for the cast — Marsha Mason, Brenda Meaney, and Lauren O’Leary are back to re-create their roles from the in-person production that ran at the Irish Rep in in the fall of 2019. I wrote of that production, “Three generations of women in a North Dublin family share their foibles and exert their fortitude in successive monologues in Marc Atkinson Borrull’s engaging if not quite sparkling revival. First seen in the US at the Flea in 2010, the hundred-minute play begins with eighteen-year-old Amber (O’Leary), who enters a doctor’s office waiting room and talks about a night of partying at a high school ball with her best friend, Jo, involving drugs and alcohol, dancing, and her maybe-boyfriend, Paul. When she is done, her mother, Lorraine (Meaney), comes in and, while Amber watches her, discusses a strange occurrence at the store where she works that ends up with her having to speak with human resources. And then Kay (Mason), Amber’s grandmother and Lorraine’s mother, walks in and, while the other two look at her, describes her vaginal itch and her ill husband, Gem, who she loves but calls a ‘cantankerous oul’ fuck.’ She says, ‘I’m the wrong side of sixty, not dead. I haven’t had sex in well over a year and it’s killing me.’”

The reading is again directed by Borrull, with the actors filmed remotely at their homes in Connecticut, London, and New York. It works surprisingly well as the story, a series of monologues, unfolds in personal, private spaces that lend an intimacy that was just off in the stage play. When Lorraine explains about an HR person, “She reaches across the desk and touches my hand. Don’t remember the last time someone touched me, hugged me, or even bleedin’ nudged me,” it strikes deep, as we’ve all been quarantining, not interacting with other people for more than a year, watching works online in which actors are in separate Zoom boxes, unable to make physical contact. (Kay’s complaint about not having sex in a year also has additional impact because of the coronavirus crisis.) Little Gem is streaming on demand at specific times from April 27 to May 9; tickets are free, but a $25 donation is suggested if you can afford it. The Irish Rep, which has broken the mold of what is possible during the lockdown, has also brought back its ten previous virtual productions, including the must-see On Beckett with Bill Irwin, The Weir by Conor McPherson, and Brendan Conroy in The Aran Islands, each available on demand here.

THE ARAN ISLANDS: A PERFORMANCE ON SCREEN

Brendan Conroy roams empty theaters and a rocky landscape in cinematic reimagining of The Aran Islands (photo courtesy Irish Rep)

THE ARAN ISLANDS
Irish Rep Online
March 23-28, suggested donation $25
irishrep.org

As far as I can tell, no other company in the world has been able to accomplish what the Irish Rep has during the pandemic lockdown. And the West Twenty-Second St. institution has done it again with the stirring hybrid presentation of John Millington Synge’s The Aran Islands, about the Dublin writer’s experiences in the islands off the west coast of Ireland in 1898, a journey urged by W. B. Yeats.

The Irish Rep has quenched at least part of the thirst of theater lovers desperate for entertainment by reimagining past works for the virtual environment, using innovative techniques that include green-screened backgrounds and real props that make it appear that the actors are in the same room. In Conor McPherson’s The Weir, the characters seemed to be passing around drinks as they each shared a ghost story. In Eugene O’Neill’s A Touch of the Poet, it looked as if family members were sitting at the same table at an inn.

The company, which was founded in 1988 by Charlotte Moore and Ciarán O’Reilly, who are still at the helm and leading the online programming, also has produced Darren Murphy’s The Gifts You Gave to the Dark, a live show filmed with a smartphone (and one of the first to address the health crisis directly); Bill Irwin’s On Beckett, updated for the pandemic and beginning with Irwin walking down Twenty-Second St. and entering the Irish Rep, performing onstage to empty seats; and Love, Noël: The Songs and Letters of Noël Coward, in which Steve Ross and KT Sullivan revisit their recent two-person hit at the Irish Rep by moving into the Players, following all Covid-19 protocols.

And now the Irish Rep and Co-Motion Media, which teamed up in 2017 for Joe O’Byrne’s adaptation of Synge’s 1907 book, The Aran Islands, have transformed the one-man show into a gripping, uncanny film, directed by O’Byrne and again starring Brendan Conroy. The ninety-minute work was shot by O’Byrne in the New Theatre and the Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin as well as on the rocky shores of the title location, where a grizzled Conroy, portraying a descendant of Synge’s, roams around through the fog and mist, searching for folks speaking Gaelic and relating wonderful tales, often with a supernatural twist, by and about the people he encounters, taking on their personas. A fairy steals a child. An elderly man misses the old days. The blind storyteller of Mourteen, bent over with rheumatism, spins a yarn about two farmers, their son and daughter, and a bargain involving a bag of gold and cut-off flesh. A dead man tries to catch his unfaithful wife in the act. These and other anecdotes reveal a unique, incorruptible people who have different ideas about family and justice, hell and death.

He says of the islanders, “If a man has killed his father, and is already sick and broken with remorse, they can see no reason why he should be dragged away and killed by the law. Such a man, they say, will be quiet all the rest of his life, and if you suggest that punishment is needed as an example, they ask, ‘Would any one kill his father if he was able to help it?’”

Brendan Conroy gives a tour-de-force performance in The Aran Islands (photo courtesy Irish Rep)

At a burial, the traveler poetically explains, “This grief of the keen is no personal complaint for the death of one woman over eighty years, but seems to contain the whole passionate rage that lurks somewhere in every native of the island. In this cry of pain the inner consciousness of the people seems to lay itself bare for an instant, and to reveal the mood of beings who feel their isolation in the face of a universe that wars on them with winds and seas. They are usually silent, but in the presence of death all outward show of indifference or patience is forgotten, and they shriek with pitiable despair before the horror of the fate to which they are all doomed.”

The interior set design is by Margaret Nolan, with costume by Marie Tierney, lighting by Conleth White, and lovely original music by Kieran Duddy; O’Byrne (Departed, Enough) also edited the film, with shadowy superimpositions and ruminative shots of the sea. Conroy (Translations, Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World) delivers a tour de force performance, adjusting his accent, demeanor, and intonation for each character, every story worn into the deep lines of his face. It’s a treat for lovers of story, and one that is triumphant as a film, evolving from a book and a play in what feels like a seamless, organic way.

It’s also a marker of time, of a life lived, of right now, after a year spent in isolation, without travel or in-person theater. As Synge’s descendant states: “The old man is suggesting that I should send him a clock when I go away. He’d like to have something from me in the house, he says, the way they wouldn’t forget me, and wouldn’t a clock be as handy as another thing, and they’d be thinking of me whenever they’d look on its face.” We do have this play, although it will be available only through March 28.

2021 ORIGIN 1st IRISH THEATRE FESTIVAL

Michelle Dooley Mahon’s The Scourge tells of a woman reliving her mother’s battle with Alzheimer’s (photo by Carol Rosegg)

2021 ORIGIN 1st IRISH THEATRE FESTIVAL
January 11-31, free – $10 per event
www.origintheatre.org

The thirteenth annual Origin 1st Irish Theatre Festival has been reimagined for its 2021 iteration, a three-week collection of theatrical dramas ($10), fiction and nonfiction films ($5), and free panel discussions shedding light on the current state of Irish theater. Curated by actors Mick Mellamphy and Sarah Street, the festivities kick off January 11 with the opening ceremony on Zoom and Fishamble’s Mustard, Eva O’Connor’s one-woman Edinburgh Fringe play about a woman who falls hard for a Tour de France competitor. “The cyclist knows nothing of the madness in my bones or the mustard in my mind,” the character says. The other plays are the Wexford Arts Center’s production of Michelle Dooley Mahon’s one-woman The Scourge, an Alzheimer’s story directed by Ben Barnes; Darren Murphy’s deeply moving The Gifts You Gave to the Dark, the Irish Rep tale told over a smartphone, one of the first live works dealing with Covid-19; Origin’s Under the Albert Clock, comprising monologues by five playwrights from Northern Ireland (Emily Dedakis, Gina Donnelly, Sarah Gordon, Fionnuala Kennedy, and Alice Malseed) set around the historic Albert Clock in Belfast in 2050; About Face Ireland’s Zoom presentation Transatlantic Tales, eight original works by Matthew Cole Kelly, Melissa Annis, James McLindon, Rachel White, Emily Bohannon, Krystal Sweedman, Seamus Scanlon, and Neil Sharpson, each pairing one actor in Ireland and one in America (Amie Tedesco, Kathleen Warner Yeates, Brandon Jones, Helena White, Kevin Collins, Darina Gallagher, Orlagh Cassidy, Mark Tankersley, Erin Healani Chung, Michael Rhodes, David Ryan, John Keating, Megan Day, Kate Grimes, Paul Nugent, Richard Topol, and Maureen O’Connell); and Origin’s Stay Home and Stay Safe, four short pieces by Geraldine Aaron, Honor Molloy, Derek Murphy, and Ursula Rani Sarma about domestic violence during the pandemic, with Angel Desai, Alan Kelly, Niamh Hopper, David Spain, and Jade Jordan.

Richard Topol and Maureen O’Connell star in one of five short Zoom plays that comprise Transatlantic Tales

In addition to three showings of each play, there will be two screenings of each film, which explore unemployed actors going on a camping trip (O’Connell’s Spa Weekend), a possible miracle (Aislinn Clarke’s The Devil’s Doorway), what happens when your horse comes in (Seanie Sugrue’s Misty Button), the 1998 Good Friday Agreement (Rory Duffy’s A Fragile Peace), an incident in the Irish War of Independence (Conal Creedon’s The Burning of Cork), and a 1905 journey across Connemara by John Millington Synge and Jack B. Yeats (Margy Kinmonth’s To the Western World). There will also be five panel discussions that will stream twice; the full schedule is below.

Monday, January 11
Opening Ceremony, 3:00

Friday, January 15
“Irish Redemption — An Irish Invasion into the World of Video Games,” with Roger Clarke and Penny O Brien, 8:00

Sunday, January 17
“Producing in a Pandemic,“ offering first looks at new works, with Aoife Williamson, Derek Murphy, Tim Ruddy, David Gilna, and Lorna Fenenbock, 8:00

Monday, January 18
“Black&Irish,” focusing on diversity and inclusion in Irish arts and culture, with Femi Bankole, Leon Diop, Bonni Odoemene, Jade Jordan, and Zainab Boladale, 8:00

Wednesday, January 20
“Casting and the Irish Perspective,” with Christine McKenna Tirella, 3:00

“The Irish Tunes of Tin Pan Alley,” with Mick Moloney and Larry Kirwan, 8:00

Friday, January 22
“Irish Redemption — An Irish Invasion into the World of Video Games,” with Roger Clarke and Penny O Brien, 3:00

Saturday, January 23
“Producing in a Pandemic,“ offering first looks at new works, with Aoife Williamson, Derek Murphy, Tim Ruddy, David Gilna, and Lorna Fenenbock, 3:00

Monday, January 25
“Casting and the Irish Perspective,” with Christine McKenna Tirella, 8:00

Wednesday, January 27
“The Irish Tunes of Tin Pan Alley,” with Mick Moloney and Larry Kirwan, 3:00

Saturday, January 30
“Black&Irish,” focusing on diversity and inclusion in Irish arts and culture, with Femi Bankole, Leon Diop, Bonni Odoemene, Jade Jordan, and Zainab Boladale, 3:00

Saturday, January 31
Closing Ceremony, 5:00

#IRISHREPONLINE: ON BECKETT / IN SCREEN

Who: Bill Irwin
What: Livestreams of updated show
Where: Irish Rep online
When: November 17-22, suggested donation $25
Why: In my October 2018 review of Bill Irwin’s mostly one-person-show, On Beckett, at the Irish Rep, I wrote, “Irwin adds fascinating insight to [Samuel] Beckett and his oeuvre, discussing the Nobel Prize winner’s punctuation and pronoun usage, his identity and heritage, the possible influence of vaudeville on his work, his detailed stage directions, and other intricacies. . . . Irwin is a delight to watch, his passion for Beckett infectious. He occasionally goes off topic in comic ways, wrestling with a microphone and toying with the podium, but he eventually gets back on track for an enchanting piece of theater about theater.” Irwin (Old Hats, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) is now revisiting the play, updating it in this time of pandemic lockdown, in a Covid-19-sensitive version he codirected onstage at the Irish Repertory Theatre with M. Florian Staab; Brian Petchers served as director of photography and editor, with set design by Charlie Corcoran, lighting by Michael Gottlieb, and music and sound by Staab. Irwin’s revised take on Waiting for Godot could probably make a show all its own. The seventy-five-minute On Beckett / In Screen will stream November 17-22; suggested donation is $25.

IRISH REP ONLINE: BELFAST BLUES

Who: Geraldine Hughes
What: Livestream of prerecorded final performance of Belfast Blues
Where: Irish Rep online
When: September 22-27, suggested donation $25
Why: Born in Belfast and based in New York, Irish actress and playwright Geraldine Hughes has appeared in such films as Rocky Balboa and Killing Lincoln, such television series as Law & Order SVU and The Blacklist, and such Broadway hits as Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and Jerusalem. But she’s most well known for Belfast Blues, her autobiographical one-woman show about her childhood growing up during the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the 1980s. She first performed the play, in which she portrays twenty-four characters, in 2003 and has since taken it all over the world. She retired the play after a 2019 run back at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast, but that grand finale, held as part of West Belfast’s Féile an Phobail (Festival of the People) and directed by actress Carol Kane, was recorded for posterity and will be livestreamed by the Irish Rep in its continuing innovative online programming during the pandemic. “There’s no audience better than a Belfast audience!” Hughes said upon reviving the seventy-five-minute show one last time at the Lyric. “I’m so excited to share the story of Belfast Blues with a new generation of theatergoers and eager to retell it to all those who are returning! The support from home is truly incomparable!”

The Irish Rep has previously staged the intimate, moving The Gifts You Gave to the Dark, a spectacular online iteration of The Weir, Aedin Moloney’s sexy one-woman show Yes! Reflections of Molly Bloom, and other presentations, making it one of the busiest theater companies during the pandemic, and one of the most successful when it comes to adapting to online viewing. Tickets are free, but there is a suggested donation of $25. Next up for the company is Give Me Your Hand (a poetic stroll through the National Gallery of London) October 13-18, Eugene O’Neill’s A Touch of the Poet October 27 to November 1, and the two-part A Beggar Upon Horseback with John Douglas Thompson as Frederick Douglass on November 9 and A Beggar on Foot on November 10.