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Three Irish playwrights transform Pittsburgh into the emerald city
Sunday, March 12, 2000 By Christopher Rawson, Post-Gazette Drama Critic
"It is Ireland's sacred duty to send over, every few years, a playwright to save the English theater from inarticulate glumness."
LONDON -- Sacred duty? That's a joke. To a colonized people, verbal ingenuity proves a redress, a resource to fall back on when even the potato crop fails. So the astonishing fertility of Irish playwriting is as likely to have been stirred by desperation or revenge -- not to mention self-assertion, pleasure and pure inventive joy.
Whatever the varied psychic sources, Ireland has been busy exporting playwriting fluency to the rest of the English-speaking world for centuries. It's almost as though there were a special scheme to breed playwrights, like stocking the rivers with salmon. And in the past generation, the flow has quickened, with fresh revelations regularly slipping down the ways in Dublin or Donegal, Connemara or Cork and sailing forth to a theatrical world avid for the latest Irish voice.
Most recently, Ireland sent out not one new young playwright, but two -- Martin McDonagh, 30, whose burst of four plays swept through Galway, London and New York in just three years, 1996-99, and Conor McPherson, just 28, whose own rapidly growing portfolio is led by "The Weir."
In what started out as a coincidence but has turned into an impromptu festival just in time for St. Patrick's Day, Pittsburgh is having a simultaneous first look at these two very different young playwrights. McPherson's "The Weir" is at the Public Theater's new O'Reilly Theater, Downtown, and McDonagh's "The Beauty Queen of Leenane" at City Theatre, South Side; both are already in previews and run through April 9.
And as a further testament to the power of Irish playwriting, its greatest living master, Brian Friel, will soon join the party. His spare and mysterious "Faith Healer" (1979) will be staged March 23-April 4 by one of our newest small professional companies, the Pittsburgh Irish and Classical Theatre. "Faith Healer" is a beautiful and seminal play, closer to the enigmatic monologues of his "Molly Sweeney" (City Theatre, 1997) than to the more robust poignancy of his "Dancing at Lughnasa" (Public Theater, 1993).
But the celebratory event is the debut of these two young playwrights, linked here and internationally only by their Irishness (more about that later) and the accident of timing. McDonagh won the (London) Evening Standard award for most promising playwright in 1996; McPherson won it in 1997. McPherson's "Weir" was the bigger hit in London, where it's still running, but McDonagh's "Beauty Queen" was the bigger success on Broadway, where it won four Tonys.
They don't like being yoked together, of course -- that's been made clear by friends and associates of each. Nor is it really a danger, because as immensely different as McDonagh and McPherson are, no one will have any trouble telling them apart as soon as they've seen the plays.
They do at least share the condition of youthful success. In a couple of weeks of pursuit, I never got closer to either than the opening-night party for McPherson's newest play, "Dublin Carol." They were both there -- working different sides of the room, I imagine -- but it wasn't the occasion to intrude on their celebrations. For the rest of the time, their lives have been a flurry of trips back and forth to Dublin, New York and who knows where else. McDonagh's plays already have been done in 38 countries, for example -- that's how fast success can hit in this unitary world.
Both are also trying to keep some time to themselves for writing. Each is described by friends as remarkably mature and self-confident. The plays support that -- McPherson's with their beautifully layered language and nuanced character, McDonagh's with their wild vigor and daring black humor. And they'd better watch their backs. I've already heard of a brace of other Irish playwrights in their mid-20s with first London productions under their belts.
Being Irish
Irishness, it seems, is a matter of some dispute. To inquiries about McDonagh in London, I kept hearing that he was not even true Irish but "London Irish," something far different, I was assured.
There's already a world of difference between different brands within the Emerald Isle. Villages distinguish themselves more firmly from their neighbors than Pittsburgh does from Cleveland, and there are the grander distinctions between Galway and Cork, Wicklow and Derry -- distinctions that sink even deeper than (and will, we hope, outlast) the imposed 20th-century line drawn between North and South.
It's only one step more to extend this multiplicity of Irishness out into the widening concentric circles of the Irish diaspora -- Liverpool first, then London, Boston, then England, the United States, Canada and beyond. If McDonagh, barely removed from Ireland by a half-generation and having spent much time there, is forced to take an asterisk with his Irish Playwright label, then what do we call Eugene O'Neill?
Perhaps O'Neill doesn't fit into any obvious grouping of Irish playwrights, but from another perspective, he certainly does. "The Ex-Isle of Erin" (a pun borrowed from Ambrose Bierce) is what Fintan O'Toole calls his book about "images of a global Ireland." Once, exile was a natural state for an Irish author. Sheridan, Shaw and Wilde might not have thought of themselves that way, but Joyce certainly did, and Beckett; might it not also help to understand O'Neill?
Now, even as contemporary Irish prosperity starts to reverse the centuries-old pattern of flight, the children of the diaspora mature. Is their art still Irish?
And is "Irish drama" defined solely by birth? The categories of full Irish, semi-Irish and "ex-isle" don't begin to cover it. The Irishness of some of the great early playwrights has been marginalized by some as Anglo-Irish -- apparently Irish birth and even a descent of several generations wasn't enough. Sean O'Casey's Irishness was rejected by some because he was Protestant. Even if we could settle the nationality part of the definition, must an Irish play itself deal with Ireland or at least Irish peoples and themes? Long-standing, hair-splitting debates about what constitutes black or Jewish theater come to mind.
Perhaps because of the press of history, the search for identity and external expectation (what sells), there has been a strong tendency among 20th-century Irish playwrights to write specifically about the matter of Ireland. (Similarly, 20th-century American black writers have felt it necessary to write primarily about black America.) In his "Politics of Irish Drama," Nicholas Grene traces this historically, concluding, "The need for the Irish playwright to write plays about Ireland has made Beckett the odd anomalous figure he is in an Irish theatrical context." Irish drama also has generally stayed representational, making the conscious archaism or stylization of Yeats (or O'Neill) the exception.
Then however we define Irish drama, what is its appeal? Part is the specific history it recounts, a poignant saga that implicates everyone English and Irish while it also parallels other painful histories. Our American ethnic affiliation with Ireland is intense; it isn't just on St. Patrick's Day that so many claim Irish blood.
Then there's the glorious, fierce, fresh flood of language, about which many words have been spilt. Lots of it has been nonsense about a special ethnic ability. Mary Larkin, actress wife of Jim Norton, who played the lead in "The Weir" in both London and New York, recalls an American couple exiting from the play on Broadway: "What wonderful acting!" exclaimed the one. "No," said the other, "I think they're all from Ireland, and they're just naturally like that."
Even T.S. Eliot was taken in like this, opining that the characters of John Millington Synge ("The Playboy of the Western World") could be both "poetic and real" only because Synge based them on "characters whose originals in life talked poetically." This is a version of the myth of the noble savage, but Synge encouraged it -- Dubliners would have assumed the same about his "simple" west coast folk. Actually, it takes high art to make an Irish farmer (or anyone else) talk with such verbal panache.
This suggests a fourth appeal to add to subject matter, ethnic affiliation and rich language -- that of the "other." You can hear a trace of it in Tynan's joke about "Ireland's sacred duty." When he wrote it, he was welcoming Brendan Behan's "The Quare Fellow," and you can just hear the old condescension in which the Irish were praised for entertaining their colonial masters.
Witness another Mary Larkin memory of someone exiting from "The Weir" on Broadway: "I don't know what that was all about, and there wasn't even a song in it!" It's not far from this back to the ignominious history of the "stage Irishman," a caricature designed to flatter English and American self-regard, much as the "stage darkies" of earlier American theater flattered white complacency.
But even if we recognize many aspects of "Irishness" are derived from caricature, true differences remain. Fully independent and enfranchised, Irish drama still has the ability to show us a people somewhat like "us" (whoever we are), but not quite the same. That tests our sense of ourselves -- historically, collectively, but, at the theater's best, individually, too.
And this "otherness" explains much about the glorious language. Even to the Irish who don't speak Gaelic, that native tongue remains a reality, potent even across the couple of centuries since it was systematically suppressed. The English of Ireland has been laid over this other language that still bubbles up within it, refreshing its successor with tangy locutions and a quasi-alien way of parceling out experience.
Why 'The Weir'?
Local theaters promoting each other's plays
Past and present Irish voices n the English-speaking theater
Conor McPherson and 'The Weir'
The best possible introduction to "The Weir" and to McPherson, both, is this note with which he prefaces the published version:
"This play was probably inspired by my visits to Leitrim to see my grandad. He lived on his own down a country road in a small house beside the Shannon. I remember him telling me once that it was important to have the radio on because it gave him the illusion of company. We'd have a drink and sit at the fire. And he'd tell me stories. And then when you're lying in bed in the pitch black silence of the Irish countryside, it's easy for the imagination to run riot. I always felt different there. I can still see him standing on the platform at the station. He always waved for much too long. Much longer than a person who was glad to have their privacy back."
Think about that. Feel the hint of a shiver on the back of your neck. Hear the quiet empathy of character. Now you're ready for "The Weir."
In his work so far, McPherson has proved himself a master of the monologue -- they bulk large in "The Weir," and others of his plays are monologues, including "St. Nicholas," which he describes as "about a theater critic who falls in love with an actress and ends up working for vampires." Brian Cox played it at London's small Bush Theatre and then off-Broadway. Right now, Cox also is playing the lead in McPherson's new play, "Dublin Carol," at London's Royal Court.
In his casual, conversational afterword to a collection of five of his plays, McPherson describes himself as shy to talk about his plays. He once took the English director and set designer who were going to stage "The Weir" to Leitrim to see where he'd placed it in his mind. "I had some pangs of guilt and remorse," he writes. "What gave me the right to situate a piece of fiction so firmly in a real place? I became slightly reluctant to talk about it anymore."
Not so shy about discussing "The Weir" is actor Jim Norton, who originated the role of Jack being played at the Public by Tom Atkins. He talked of McPherson's "maturity and understanding of character," which, as a man of perhaps 60 himself, he found unusual in one so young. Maybe that and the play's insight on loss and redemption have something to do with McPherson's philosophy degree, he thought.
His experience also exceeds his youth. He's a co-founder of the Fly By Night Theatre Company. His "This Lime Tree Bower" has just been made into a well-received movie called "Saltwater" -- which he directed -- and he is said to be directing Michael Gambon in Beckett's "Endgame" as part of a complete TV version of Beckett's works. Rookies don't get that kind of assignment.
I asked Norton what advice he'd give Atkins, who's one of the first to tackle Jack, since the play was just recently released for regional theater production. (The Public was one of the first in line, just as it was for Irishman Sebastian Barry's "The Steward of Christendom," in which Atkins also starred.)
" 'Follow your bliss,' I'd tell him," Norton said. "Conor is such a good writer, it's all there on the page. Trust the text and keep it simple -- less is more."
According to Norton, "Story-telling is the only therapy Ireland believes in -- it helps to deal with the demons." That's a good clue both to the play's meanings and its narrative technique. "The important thing is to let the audience bring their experience to the play," he said. And he admitted having to work as hard as ever in his life, getting the audience to do that.
Part of the problem on Broadway was that, after having played in intimate theaters in London ("The Weir" also premiered at the Royal Court), it was forced onto a larger stage. That shouldn't be a problem in Pittsburgh, giving the audiences every chance to sift their way through a lovely, subtle play.
Martin McDonagh and 'The Beauty Queen of Leenane'
One of the dominant modes of Irish drama has been a form of pastoral, with its reference back to a golden if oppressed rural purity, then further back to a mythical age of heroes.
Granted, in 20th-century drama that pastoral sometimes shows up in reverse, in images of failed idealism, debunking even the heroes of "The Troubles." But McDonagh goes further still. Much of his grim, zestful humor comes from standing pastoral on its head, turning it into a scabrous negative but setting it right in the holiest of romantic holies -- the most primitive "Irish" countryside of all, the Aran Isles and Connemara, that rocky projection of County Galway where Gaelic remains native.
Whatever he does, it certainly works. In 1997, McDonagh had the distinction, matched by no one in history but Shakespeare, of having four plays running simultaneously in London. Chief among them was his Leenane trilogy, three independent but similarly grisly comi-tragedies set in the fictional Connemara town of Leenane. "Beauty Queen" turns on the power struggle between an aging mother and her caretaker daughter. "A Skull in Connemara" pits a man against the possibility that he murdered his wife. And "The Lonesome West" balances two feuding brothers with a randy 17 year-old girl and a desperate priest.
The Leenane trilogy premiered at the Druid Theatre in Galway and moved to London's Royal Court. Making its premiere at London's National Theatre was the fourth play, "The Cripple of Inishmaan," all about scheming to escape from the Aran Islands. That has now grown into another trilogy with "The Lieutenant of Inishmore" and "The Banshees of Inisheer," both on the verge of production in London.
Sounds pretty Irish, and yet you'd think McDonagh was a carpetbagger, the way I've heard his plays criticized as though they were a float in the Chicago St. Patrick's Day parade, more "Oirish" than Irish. Yes, McDonagh was born in London, but his parents were a construction worker from Galway and a part-time housekeeper from Sligo who both live in Ireland once more.
Though he grew up in working-class London, he was surrounded with Irish aunts and uncles and spent his summers in Connemara and Sligo. Anyway, the ironies of "Irish" proliferate. Irishman McPherson started his plays in London, but London-Irish McDonagh, in Galway.
As O'Toole says in the introduction to the Leenane trilogy, "McDonagh's London-Irish background allows him to hold in perfect tension an extraordinary range of elements from both sides of the Irish Sea." The family, church, long dreamed of Irish nation, memory, Gaelic past and even nature itself -- nothing sustains. And yet McDonagh's vigorous language (which O'Toole likens to a blend of Pinter, Joe Orton and McDonagh's Irish predecessors) and his earthy melodrama join to create painful comedy and outrageous tragedy. "Dirty realism continually shading into heightened epic," O'Toole calls it.
No wonder how McDonagh's was "discovered" by his literary agent, Rod Hall.
"I was talking to the literary manager at the Bush Theatre," he told me, "and as an agent does, I asked if they had anything promising. There was a kind of a sigh, 'Well, we have one writer, he's kind of odd, but you might like him.'"
Hall did. But even though the then 25-year-old McDonagh was still unproduced, he knew he was about to make it, "so I had in a sense to woo him, because he wanted to do it all himself." Now that there are contracts with 38 countries to negotiate, the two are very busy together.
Although two of McDonagh's other plays have been off-Broadway, "Beauty Queen" is the one that's made it biggest in the United States. "I think it's a gem," says Hall. "Frankly, apart from the new 'Lieutenant of Inishmore,' I think it's his best."
Brian Friel and 'Faith Healer'
Of living Irish playwrights, Friel, 70, is the master, having earned that title with more than two dozen plays over 30 years. "Philadelphia, Here I Come!" (1964) made his early name, but the appearance of "Aristocrats," "Faith Healer" and "Translations," all in 1979-80, raised him to a higher level, and the luminous warmth and accessibility of "Dancing at Lughnasa" (1990) gave him broad popularity to match his well-established critical esteem.
Both "Translations" and "Lughnasa" have robust humor and a rich sense of colorful place, but within them lurk Friel's darker insights, which are even clearer in his much sparer mode, as those who remember his "Molly Sweeney" at City Theatre in 1997 will testify. "Faith Healer" is in this more abstract, inward mode, with a close-to-the-bone somberness that reminds us that Samuel Beckett was Irish, too.
As with many Friel plays, "Faith Healer" makes reference to Friel's favorite invented place, Ballybeg, a fictional town in his own county of Donegal, in the north of Ireland (which is not the same as Northern Ireland). In the past 20 years Friel has often put his artistry on the line in the interest of rejuvenating the demoralized north, joining with Stephen Rea and others to found Field Day, which has premiered many of his plays in the north.
One way to summarize Friel's blend of the political and individual -- of sweeping social sensibility and individualized melancholy -- is to call it Russian. He has shown an affinity for the great Russians who wrap broad compassion around personal tragedy, having adapted/translated four works by Turgenev and Chekhov for the stage.
It's always risky to allegorize dramatic stories. (I've seen an interpretation of McDonagh's "Beauty Queen" that turns it into the story of downtrodden Mother Ireland suffocating her young, which blunts its grim humor as well as missing the truth of modern Ireland.) But Friel's plays often do support mythic interpretations. From "Faith Healer" to "Lughnasa," they seem to have bones made of ancient ritual. In "Faith Healer," the central metaphor is that of the artist whose mysterious powers he cannot fully understand or control. You can see this as a meditation on the historically unhappy relationship between Ireland and its artists, but I think it goes deeper, right back to Orpheus, the artist destroyed by the subversive power within his own art.
Perhaps it is the natural condition of Irish artists to touch on this mythic level. Friel has himself connected that power to the language: The Irish, he has said, "are a spiritual people to the extent, I suppose, that our language is shot through with the language of spirituality and the language of the other world and the language of otherness."
The artist's lot is not an easy one. Friel knows this, as he shows in the published excerpts from his diaries, in which the struggle, tentativeness and general fear of failure involved in writing are made clear with unflinching honesty and dark humor. Our theater is fortunate to have Irish artists who continue to contribute their dark genius to a great tradition.
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Playwright: Conor McPherson