Billy Sloane (Tim Ruddy) and Josie Larmer (Sarah Street) wonder about life as Francis Xavier Sloane (John Keating) plays the piano in the background in The Naturalists (photo by Richard Termine)
Walkerspace
46 Walker St.
Tuesday – Sunday through September 23, $45
thepondtheatre.org
Irish playwright Jaki McCarrick makes her New York debut with the world premiere of The Naturalists, an intimate, involving drama that is having too short a run at Walkerspace, where it continues through September 23. It’s 2010, and brothers Francis Xavier (John Keating) and Billy Sloane (Tim Ruddy) are living together in a cluttered mobile home in a rural hamlet in County Monaghan. Francis is a tall, thin, calm man who engages with nature and tries to give people the benefit of the doubt. Billy is a paunchy, brooding brute who sits around watching soap operas and guzzling beer while spread over the couch, always leaving a mess behind. While Francis carefully takes off his boots and places them outside the door, Billy trudges into the house and kicks them off, spreading around whatever he stepped in. “Do ya not know how to live?” Francis asks. “Don’t do the easy thing. The drink, the telly. And couldn’t we leave the door open for a change and listen to the birds like we used ta? Oh, it’s a beautiful night — and so warm, Billy . . . and the tall trees, the darkness of them against the still bright sky. Aren’t we lucky in Ireland we have the long nights in May? We could be watchin’ somethin’ real, Billy, and not that oul shite.” To which a grumbling Billy replies, “What I want to be watchin’ the trees for? What am I? A bird? Haven’t we fecked our lives away on them long enough? I have anyway.”
Weary of the stasis and mess of two bachelors living together, Francis hires a part-time housekeeper, young Josie Larmer (Sarah Street), an airy, Honda 50-riding vegan who needs to make some money and doesn’t mind looking after the brothers, whose mother disappeared long ago. Francis is virtually obsessed with the natural world, and slowly it becomes clear why — a former IRA member, he spent twelve years in prison for having masterminded the 1979 Narrow Water bombing, which killed eighteen British soldiers. (Although the characters in the play are fictional, the bombing was real, but the perpetrators were never identified. Coincidentally, there was an attack on the Narrow Water memorial just this past weekend that is being treated by police as a hate crime.) Both Francis and Billy take a liking to Josie, who doesn’t mind the attention, but when an old IRA compatriot of Francis’s, John-Joe Doherty (Michael Mellamphy), aka Joey the Lip, unexpectedly shows up, the past threatens to overwhelm and destroy both Sloane brothers.
Francis Xavier Sloane (John Keating) and Josie Larmer (Sarah Street) share a love of nature as Billy Sloane (Tim Ruddy) looks on in world premiere play by Jaki McCarrick (photo by Richard Termine)
A presentation of the Pond Theatre Company, The Naturalists is warmly directed by Pond cofounders Colleen Clinton and Lily Dorment. (Street is the third cofounder; Clinton and Dorment have acted in the company’s previous shows, 2016’s Abigail’s Party and 2017’s Muswell Hill.) Chika Shimizu’s inviting set is wide open; a few scenes even take place on the floor, only a few feet away from the audience, as if everyone in the theater is taking part. It might be 2010, but the brothers seem trapped in time. They have an old TV console, a ratty record player with LPs strewn about, and no microwave. Cellphones are nowhere to be seen; it’s as if they are lost in Henry David Thoreau’s legacy. Music is integral to the show; while songs by Tom Waits play a major role, particularly “Martha,” Steely Dan’s “Josie” is a bit too obvious. All four actors are excellent, but Keating, whose long credits include many works at the Irish Rep, TFANA, and Irish Arts, is a standout; he gives a sweet, gentle humanity to Francis, who is essentially a mass murderer, yet we genuinely feel for him. There are minor structural issues, but those are mere quibbles; McCarrick’s (em>Belfast Girls, Leopoldville) play deals with ideas of atonement and solace in delicate, graceful ways, with a sly touch of trademark Irish black humor that seems as inescapable as that country’s troubled past.
Although writer-director Rob Zombie refuses to call this a sequel to 2003’s House of 1000 Corpses, The Devil’s Rejects is a sequel to Zombie’s 2003 horror hit House of 1000 Corpses. Mad clown Captain Spaulding (Sid Haig) is back, as are murderous siblings Otis (Bill Moseley) and Baby (Sheri Moon Zombie, Rob’s wife). Mother Firefly, played by the vixenous Karen Black in the first flick, is here portrayed with delicious delight by Leslie Easterbrook (of Police Academy fame). In this gorefest, Otis and Baby are on the lam from Sheriff Wydell (William Forsythe), who is determined to avenge his brother’s death; they hole up in a skeevy motel with a quartet of hostages that includes perennial Clint Eastwood bad boy Geoffrey Lewis and Three’s Company escapee Priscilla Barnes. Zombie cleverly plays with genre cliches throughout the film; what you think is going to happen — or not happen — gets turned upside down, so you never quite know where things are heading (although you can always count on a shot of his wife’s butt). Zombie, leader of the heavy metal band White Zombie, injects a wry sense of humor by including such ’70s pop music as Elvin Bishop’s “Fooled Around and Fell in Love,” Steely Dan’s “Reelin’ in the Years,” David Essex’s “Rock On,” and even Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Freebird,” always at extremely appropriate moments. Add a star if you love films that relish gore; delete two and a half if you can’t stand them. The Devil’s Rejects is being shown January 2 and 3 at 12:10 am as part of Nitehawk Cinema’s Nitehawk Nasties and Nitehawk Midnite Screenings series.
