The poster for Inis Nua’s latest play.
Tom Reing was education director for InterAct Theater Company in 2002 when, as part of a fellowship, he started working with a group of Catholic school kids in Gray’s Ferry, a traditionally Irish enclave in South Philadelphia that regularly ignited with racial violence because of its proximity to a low-income housing project known as the Tasker homes.
“A lot of my work involved using theater to teach conflict resolution skills. We would rehearse a confrontation and how to get out of it,” recalled Reing, now artistic director of the nonprofit Inis Nua Theater Company, in a phone interview this week. “The kids were dealing with feeling threatened by the African-American neighborhood surrounding them. We would create improv out of what they did during the day, I would record them, and then sculpt it into a scene. The Gray’s Ferry neighborhood is very territorial. You can tell you’re on an Irish block by the lace curtains and leprechaun Hummels in the windows. One of the great lines that came up was from one of the African American students who told an Irish student, ‘Your block is not a continent,’ meaning that it doesn’t drop off once you pass 29th street.”
In 2003, in Belfast, Ireland—also part of his fellowship project—he worked with a group of teens who were similarly living with daily violence, though sectarian rather than racial. “Of course at the end of the day, they were both groups that didn’t like one another, fearful because they didn’t know each other and didn’t want to know each other and both living with the fear they weren’t going to make it out,” he says.
He took those scenes he recorded—gritty dialogue and high drama—and turned it into a play. “High Noon in Gray’s Ferry, Twilight on Falls Road,” will debut on Monday at Inis Nua as five actors do a staged reading, each playing characters from both communities “so the same actor plays two parts with two different accents,” explains Reing. “It was a way to compare and contrast the two groups, with the same lines repeated in both worlds.”
The trip to Ireland—his first—produced more than a play. It sowed the seeds for what has become the Inis Nua Theatre Company, which produces plays by contemporary Irish and UK playwrights at the Off Broad Street Theater at First Baptist Church in Philadelphia. “I flew into Dublin and saw some theater while I was there. I saw some theater in Belfast too, and I really liked the work. I wanted it to come to America, but it never did,” says Reing.
There was no venue in the US for contemporary plays by Irish and UK playwrights, except for a few—the big ones, like Brian Friel, Martin McDonagh and Conor McPherson. “The usual route for an Irish play was to go to the West End (in London), then to Broadway, then the regionals would take it,” says Reing, who got his MA in theater at Villanova and now teaches at Temple. “I went to other artistic directors and asked if they would do one of these plays and they said, ‘It’s not really in our mission.’ So I did it myself.”
Ten years ago, he founded Inis Nua to produce the kind of provocative new plays he now sees in Ireland, Scotland, and the UK on his far more frequent trips.
“I was naïve, but I would talk to playwrights and say, ‘would you be okay with me doing this play in America and if it isn’t too much trouble, can I get a script?’ I was working at the Abbey Theater one summer doing a theater-in-education program, saw a play, met the playwright, and the next day the script was waiting for me. At that point, we had a company that didn’t have two dimes to rub together and we maybe had a website. I was oblivious to the fact that they really want their plays done in America. We do a lot of American premiers of new plays. The last show we did was ‘Blink’ by Phil Porter, an English playwright. He emailed me last week to tell me that a production of ‘Blink’ was coming to New York, and we beat them to it.”
The success of Inis Nua surprised even Reing, who thought the best he was going to be able to do was bring one new play a year to the Philadelphia Fringe Festival. “I never though we’d get to 10 years with a three-show season in a permanent home,” he admits. “Right now I’m talking to you from living room surrounded by all my own furniture,” he says laughing, “not the bed from [the play] ‘Bedbound’ and the other stage props I didn’t want to spend the money to store somewhere. Now we have a rehearsal room, office space, and a place in the basement to build sets and store them.”
See a staged reading of “High Noon in Gray’s Ferry, Twilight on Falls Road” on Monday, January 27, at 7 PM, at the Off-Broad Street Theater at First Baptist Church, 1636 Sansom Street in Philadelphia.
“Trousers,” a play by Paul Meade and David Parnell, is set for a run of 16 performances starting on February 5. It’s a story about the friendship between two Dubliners—one a mailman, the other unemployed–who reminisce about the summer they spent in New York when they were in college.
To order tickets, go to the Inis Nua website.
