August 2007

"Trad" director Tom Reing

In the play, Trad, by Irish comedian Mark Doherty, which will open September 12 at Philadelphia’s Mum Puppettheater, the character, old Thomas, a 100-year-old Irish bachelor farmer, sets off with his ancient “Da” to find the son Thomas fathered many years before in a short-lived dalliance with Mary, whose last name he can’t recall but who “had a certain stare on her.”

In this comic take on the hero’s journey, Thomas is the reluctant Don Quixote (fill in your favorite literary quester) who sets out on the road because his father, on his death bed, has been lamenting his lack of an heir. To the old man (make that older man), that means “the end of the name,” the end of everything. When Thomas confesses his apparently singular indiscretion to his dying Da, his father makes a remarkable recovery. “Get me my leg,” he orders, and the two men hobble off into the countryside in search of the lad, who is 70 if he’s a day–or alive.

On their way, Thomas and his Da encounter the realities of modern Ireland, a country now wired on coffee and wireless with Bluetooth, where the waitress serving you tea might speak Polish and those nice folks who moved into the McLaughlin’s old cottage emigrated from Abuja, Nigeria. Director Tom Reing (it’s a Cork name, he says) experienced a little of that culture shock between 2002, when he lived in Ireland on an Independence Foundation fellowship, and just recently when he met with the author of “Trad” in Dublin.

“In 2002, I stayed in a hostel, and when I was in the area again, it had been completely transformed into a Chinatown. Even the signs were in Chinese,” says Reing, a Penn graduate who used his fellowship to work with the Rainbow Theater Company in Belfast, a cross-community group for Catholic and Protestant children and teens. (He founded a similar company in Philadelphia’s diverse Gray’s Ferry neighborhood.) “The old Irish pub on the block was the only thing still in existence from my previous visit.”

Playwright Doherty mocks not so much tradition as he does those who cling to it. He’s like the modern Irishman who snickers (or bristles) when American tourists are disappointed not to find thatched roofs, craggy farmers, and barefoot beauties in a farmyard, but a bustling, thriving economy and all–good and bad–that Ireland’s new prosperity entails. When Da praises the Irish tradition of never giving up, Thomas retranslates this cultural precept as, “standing still and facing backwards.”

“The father is into tradition–Ireland’s old ways are the best ways–so the play examines tradition versus modernity, what you need to keep of the past, yet at the same time with the knowledge that you can’t stop change,” says Reing. But Doherty is a comic actor, so the play doesn’t take its solemn side seriously. Not in the least.

“He uses the stereotype of old bachelor farmers and takes it over the top and subverts it,” explains Reing. Although the Abbey Theater, which commissioned the work, is meticulous about regional dialects, in “Trad,” even the accents are exaggerated. “Not quite ‘ Lucky Charms’ but definitely not realistic,” laughs the director, who is also an adjunct professor at LaSalle University, where he is the resident theater director, and the founder of the Inis Nua Theater Company in Philadelphia, which is producing the play.

“Trad” is a perfect play for this fledgling company which Reing founded three years ago to produce contemporary works from Ireland and the UK. Inis Nua is Gaelic for “new island,” and Reing’s choices reflect a leaning toward the modern; don’t hold your breath waiting for him to direct “Playboy of the Western World.” Nothing against Synge–but a new generation of playwrights has its own take on the changing human condition.

Unfortunately, Inis Nua doesn’t have its own theater, so the company has had to improvise. The first Inis Nua play Reing produced and directed, “A Play on Two Chairs,” was staged at an art gallery. Fortunately, the play is performed on, yes, two chairs, so the production wasn’t expensive. Last year’s Fringe Festival entry, “Crazy Gary’s Mobile Disco” by Welsh playwright Gary Owen (the story of three guys stuck in the same deadend small Welsh town) was staged outside the upstairs men’s bathroom at the Khyber, a rock club and bar on Second Street. That led to some interesting improv.

“In the middle of a performance, someone from the bar got incredibly sick in there. No one mopped it up–they just threw bleach in. The actor was almost nauseous,” Reing says.

You can see “Trad” at the much more comfortable Mum Puppettheatre at 115 Arch, where, normally, the actors are made of cloth or plastic. “Theater space is at a premium,” says Reing. “But it’s a legitimate theater, with 100 seats, and we won’t have to endure bleach or anything.”

That’s good to know.

“Trad,” starring Mike Dees, Jared Michael Delaney and Charlie DelMarcelle, will run from September 12 through 15 at the Mum Puppettheatre at 115 Arch Street. Curtain goes up at 7 PM. Call 267-474-8077 for tickets or go to the Live Arts Festival website to order online. Price: $15.