Browsing Category

Arts

Arts

Irish Play Makes American Debut in Philadelphia

In “Skin Deep,” a thriller set in the Dublin art world, Karl, a struggling artist, owes money to his landlord, a photographer named Dan. Stuck for inspiration, one day Karl hits upon an idea, involving a huge favor from Susan, a medical student moonlighting in a hospital morgue. As Karl’s new work elevates him to celebrity status, Dan’s girlfriend Ruth, journalist, becomes suspicious of the secrets to Karl’s success. All this…and a mysterious foot!

A complex and intricate piece, Skin Deep explores the question of who owns the body, how much money the human form is worth, all set against the backdrop of a Dublin flush with new money and new ambition.

This original play is the first of the season from the Inis Nua Theatre Company, Philadelphia’s only company dedicated to producing contemporary plays from Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England. The play opens January 6 at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom Street, Philadelphia and runs till January 18.

“We’re very honored as a small theatre company to be the American premiere of this exciting Irish work,” says Inis Nua Artistic Director Tom Reing. “When I first saw the original production in 2002, I knew I wanted to produce Skin Deep. But no theatre in Philadelphia felt like a right match to pitch it. It’s kind of the reason why Inis Nua was created.”

Playwright Paul Meade, who will be attending the production, is a writer, director, actor and Artistic Director of Gúna Nua Theatre. From Limerick, Ireland, Paul trained at the Samuel Beckett Centre, Trinity College, and later received an M.A. in modern drama from U.C.D. Paul’s work as a writer includes “Scenes From a Water Cooler,” “Skin Deep,” “Thesis,” and “Trousers.” all for Gúna Nua. In 2007 Paul wrote “Mushroom” for Storytellers Theatre Company. Also in 2007 Paul was awarded a play writing commission by the Irish Council for Bioethics.

Inis Nua Artistic Director and founder, Tom Reing, will helm the production. His credits include all Inis Nua productions to date (A Play on Two Chairs, Tadhig Stray Wandered In, Crazy Gary’s Mobile Disco and Trad). Tom has also directed for (among others) Azuka Theatre, Shakespeare in Clark Park, Brat Productions and upcoming at the Walnut Street Theater.

The cast includes Corinna Burns as Ruth, Charlie DelMarcelle as Karl, Jared Michael Delaney as Dan and Melissa Lynch as Susan.
The design team includes Regina Rizzo (Costumes), Terry Smith (Lighting/Video Desgin), Mikaal Sulaiman (Sound), Paola Nogueras (Photography) Tim Gallagher (Set), with Rachel Moffat acting as Stage Manager.

Inis Nua’s Theatre Company’s mission is to produce contemporary, provocative plays from Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales that reflect these cultures new and evolving identities. Translated from the Irish language, Inis Nua means “New Island.”

Inis Nua begins its first full season with sponsorship from Fergie’s Pub; The Bards; St. Stephen’s Green; Dark Horse Pub; Black Sheep Pub; Yello’ Bar. Philadelphia Distillery will providing opening night bar services.

January 1, 2009 by
Arts, News

With a Little Help from His Friends

At the end of the Jimmy Stewart classic, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the beleaguered George Bailey, whose friends and neighbors are tossing money into a basket to replace the $8,000 missing from his savings and loan, finds a book in the pile from the angel, Clarence, who helped him when he thought life would be better for everyone if he’d never been born. In the front of the book, “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” Clarence wrote, “No man is a failure who has friends.”

And playwright William Rolleri knows that even better than George Bailey. The former New York Daily News reporter who now lives in Delaware had little hope of producing his newest play, “The Brothers Flanagan.” It’s a recession; he’s a mostly unknown quantity, as is his play about two Grays Ferry Irish pub owners whose business is being decimated by a serial killer. And, he points out ruefully, “No one wants to produce a 75-year-old playwright.”

Except maybe his friends, who have already anteed up half the cost of the production. And to raise the rest, well, in the spirit of Mickey Rooney’s Andy Hardy movie character from the 1930s, they’re putting on a show in the bar.

On December 28, two of Philadelphia’s finest actors, Michael Toner and Jack Barrett, will be performing two of Rolleri’s short one-man plays upstairs at Fergie’s Pub at 1214 Sansom Street. For $30 a ticket, you not only get two plays, but some Irish music and a Guinness Stout glass (which you can fill downstairs at the bar).

“Fergie [bar owner Fergus Carey] is one hell of a supportive guy,” says Rolleri. “He loves the theater himself, and he loves ‘The Brothers Flanagan.’ If we get the money together to do a full production in fall, we’re going to do it in Fergie’s because the whole thing takes place in a bar.”

Rolleri chose the two short plays because they both got a great reaction from audiences when they were previously performed (by Toner and Barrett). One, called “Sugar Ferguson’s Rotten Apples,” is a largely autobiographical account of an episode from Rolleri’s last visit to his grandparents in Canada, though the playwright, who is half Irish (County Wexford), transports the story to Dublin. It focuses on a near tragedy, involving kids, a forbidden apple tree, a shotgun, the police, and the parish priest. “Ring in the Old” takes place in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen where a bar patron sees an opportunity to bring back, at least for a moment, a little of the now yuppiefied area’s violent past. . .for auld lang syne. Expect some midnight dark humor.

The generosity of his friends has inspired Rolleri to pay it forward. “It occurred to me that there are a lot of younger playwrights in Philly and some of them are very good, but they have trouble getting produced because their work is original and their names not known; their names are not going to sell tickets,” he says. “I have a few friends who wanted me to go ahead and get my play produced, and I decided that if I go ahead, I’m not going ahead alone. Whatever we get at the box office will go to produce another play—not me, but another playwright.”

You can help Rolleri and the unknown playwrights his success will also lift by attending “Apres Noel, Christmassy Plays,” on Sunday, December 28, at 7 PM. For tickets (there are only 50 seats, so act fast), contact Fergie’s at 215-928-8118 or Steve Hatzai at 215-769-0552, or? swhatz@msn.com.

December 24, 2008 by
Arts, News

The Mysteries in the Bog

One April morning in the west of Ireland, a farmer cutting turf in his bog makes a gruesome discovery: the head of a woman, face tanned like leather, with long red hair. As two experts arrive to investigate—one an Irish archeologist named Cormac Maguire and the other an American pathologist called Nora Gavin—the mystery of the ancient “bog body” becomes entangled with the recent suspicious disappearance of another woman, the wife of a local landowner, and their toddler son.

 

That is the premise of the debut mystery novel, “Haunted Ground,” by American writer Erin Hart. Published in 2003, this complex and evocative book was nominated for two of the top literary prizes for mysteries, the Agatha and Anthony Awards, for best first novel. Hart masterfully crafts a satisfying mystery into which she has woven strands of history, archeology, Irish folklore, and music (Cormac plays the flute and Nora is, like Hart herself, a sean nos singer). The two characters reappear in Hart’s second novel, “The Lake of Sorrows,” which likewise melds ancient and current mysteries—two bodies, murdered centuries apart, discovered in a commercial bog in Ireland’s midland county of Offaly (where Hart’s husband, two-row button accordion player, Paddy O’Brien, was born).

I recently spent a delightful hour talking on the phone with Erin Hart from her home in Minnesota, where she co-founded the Irish Music and Dance Association. The conversation ranged from what first piqued her interest in bog bodies, her longtime passion for Irish music, and why it took her almost two decades to finally write her first mystery. That last bit of information should give renewed hope to aspiring novelists who’ve been toting a killer plot in their temporal lobes but haven’t actually gotten around to writing it down. There’s time!

How did you get the idea for your first novel?

I was always interested in words and reading, but the idea of writing a book was so completely out of my sphere of possibility, until I heard a true story about two farmers out cutting turf who found the head of a red-haired girl. I was in Donegal, staying with a friend [Altan’s Daithi Sproule, who now makes his home in Minnesota] and his mother told me that her son-in-law was a famous archeologist who studied artifiacts and people found in the bogs, and his father was also an archeologist. She told me about the red-haired girl. Later, I wrote him a letter to ask him about it, and he wrote back a beautiful letter about his memory of the event, which happened when he was 9 or 10 years old. He and his father went out to the farm of the men who found the head and they had it in a biscuit tin on their kitchen table. Hs father took the tin and put it in the back seat of the car and drove back to Dublin with it. He remembered exactly what it looked like: upper teeth biting through the lower lip, the clean cut through the neck, all those wonderful, gruesome details you could use to launch a story. He told me that it “still haunts me. Forty years later, she’s still with me.’ I thought, Wow, that woman deserves a story, even if I have to make it up.

So after hearing that story, did you immediately sit down to write about it?

Well, no. [Laughing] I was looking at my journal from that time and I had written, “What a great opening for a mystery. Someone ought to write that.” Of course, I didn’t do anything with it then. The other thing I wrote was “thinking of writing a story about a red-haired girl whose head was found in a bog.” The last entry was, “Must find out more about bogs.” [Laughing.]

How did you finally do it?

When I first heard about the red-haired girl, it was the ‘80s and I was working at the Minnesota State Arts Board. One day, when I was at the copier making a gabillion news releases to send out, I thought, “I have to take a class to keep my brain alive.” When I looked into it, I had two alternatives: Get my MBA or go into creative writing, so I chose creative writing, but I decided to stick to nonfiction because you don’t have to make stuff up. I started writing all these memoir pieces about my happy childhood, and it didn’t take too long before I realized that if you had a happy childhood, no one wants to read your memoir. So I took some journalism classes and started to do some freelance work. It was good experience learning how to meet deadlines. I was freelancing for newspapers and wound up as the theater critic for the Pioneer Press in St. Paul, writing reviews and art features. My teacher at the university was the on-air theater critic for NPR, and when he moved to San Francsico, I waltzed over to NPR and said, “You don’t have a theater critic anymore and you need one.” So for five years I was theater critic for NPR. And actually, seeing all those plays, hearing all that great dialogue, and seeing how story arcs were made really helped when I sat down to write.

Were you writing the novel all that time?

No [laughing]. Actually, 10 years went by while I went to grad school, worked fulltime, and had my freelance career as a theater critic. In grad school, I took a fiction writing class, which made me feel terrified because you have to make stuff up. Then I started writing a short story and realized, hey, you can make stuff up. But after 8 years of grad school, I only had one story. I submitted it to a magazine called Glimmertrain, which was offering a nice $1,200 cash prize for new fiction. That was around 1996. I was lying in bed one morning with pneumonia and I get a phone call: “Guess what, you won the award for new writers.” I was flabbergasted. I had been lying there in bed with pneumonia, reading all these mysteries and I started thinking, “Hey, I stepped across the creek, now I think I’ll swim the ocean.” What helped push me in that direction was after I won the prize, I got calls from several agents who had read the story and were looking for new clients. Two asked me send more of my fiction work and, as you recall, I didn’t have any. I wasn’t about to say, I have all these happy childhood memoirs, so I mentioned that I had an idea for a mystery novel set in Ireland. One said, “Sounds interesting. Let me know when you finish it.” I figured I’d never hear from her again, and I didn’t. One said, “Send me 50 pages.” It took me six years to write them. It didn’t hurt that “Angela’s Ashes’ had been published. The agent told me to hurry up and finish before “Irishness goes out of fashion.” [More laughing]

How did you choose Nora and Cormac as your lead characters?

Logic. You just ask yourself, who would be interacting with an event of this type, who comes to a bog when human remains are involved: the police, the pathologist who would decide whether it’s a modern or ancient crime, and of course, definitely, an archeologist should be the hero, and probably a pathologist interested in bog remains. Originally, my lead characters were two guys so there was no element of romance, but my agent and I and had similar ideas, that they should be a man and a woman and one Irish and one American, so they would know different things and be able to educate each other and the reader.

Did you have a good sense of who they were and where the plot would take them?

In order to find out about my characters, I have to write, I can’t just sit and plot. Playwright August Wilson said that he didn’t write plays, he took dictation. I used to think that was baloney, but it’s true. Once you’re writing, your characters do things you don’t expect, and there are plot turns you don’t expect. It’s a very intuitive process. And 90 percent of the mystery writers know say that’s their experience.  

Nearly all of your characters play some kind of instrument or, like Nora, sing, which makes sense given your involvement in Irish music.

I put a lot of music in it because everyone I know in Ireland is involved in music in some way. Devaney, the policeman in “Haunted Ground,” is a fiddle player, Cormac is a flute player, not an accordian player like Paddy, but Paddy is very partial to the flute. One of the farmers in the story, Fintan, plays the pipes. I was was half thinking of making Nora an unaccompanied singer and thought, nah, that would be too much. But Nora shares a job and interests with a woman who was a teacher at Trinity, Maura Delaney, a medical doctor. When I met her she mentioned something about going to a gig. I said, ‘Oh, what instrument do you play?’ and she said, ‘Oh, I don’t play, I’m a singer.’ So Nora became a singer because if it’s handed to you on a plate, you take it.

How did you meet your husband, Paddy?

He was traveling around the states and was playing in St. Paul. In 1981 I had gone to Ireland for a two-month language course in Connemara and had traveled around going to music festivals and things. The day I got home some friends said, “come down to this bar and hear this great band.” Halfway through the evening, I heard this booming voice saying, ‘And now well have a song from Erin Hart,’ and that was Paddy.  My friends had told him I was a singer. He would come to town every three or four months and we’d have a date. That went on for two years and then he went home to Ireland for a while. Then he came back and moved in with me. That was in 1983, and in 1987 we got married.

Has he been a source of information for you when you’re writing your mysteries?

Paddy actually used to work on big industrial bogs as a fitter. He repaired heavy machines. I wore him out with questions. He drew me diagrams about how everything works, gave me information on shifts, the weather. In “Lake of Sorrows,” there’s a scene where there’s a peat storm, where the wind picks up the peat and whirls it around. He told me about that and the “fairy wind,” a tiny tornado of peat, that gets taken across the bog. It’s spooky and is considered a premonition of something bad happening. Then there was a really odd coincidence. We were getting ready for the “Haunted Ground” launch in Ireland and guess what, they found a new body in the bog in Offaly. They thought the body might be 2,000 years old, which is exactly what I was considering for “Lake of Sorrows.” I thought, what were the chances of this turning up exactly when I needed it? I was reading the story to Paddy about how this farmer, Kevin Barry, was surprised when he climbed out of his digger to find this body, and Paddy said, “Did you say Kevin Barry?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “I think that fellow’s my cousin.” And he was. So I was freaking out. My response was, “So, do you have his phone number?” He did and we went there for two weeks and Kevin showed us all around.

You have a third book coming out, don’t you?

I just sent the manuscript in! And I’m glad I did. I couldn’t go out in the yard without one of my neighbors screeching up and asking, “When’s the book going to be done?” I was outside the other day painting some trim and my neighbor asked me, “Why aren’t you writing?” [Laughing]

Can you tell us a little bit about it? When we last leave Nora and Cormac, she’s heading home to see her parents who are still grieving over the disappearance of her sister—Nora’s back story from “Haunted Ground”–and Cormac is going to Donegal because his father has had a stroke.

It begins in St. Paul in a place called Hidden Falls Park, which is an excellent place to hide a body. Nora is coming home on plane, remembering the details sisters’ disappearance, and Cormac is in Donegal, so it kind of takes place in both places. They talk back and forth—there are still things they have not revealed to one another. He still hasn’t told her what’s happening to his father and she doesn’t tell him about coming home and meeting the policeman she was interested in before she went to Ireland and that she’s delving into her sister’s case.  

No bog bodies in this one?

Actually, that park has seepage marshes that are something like microsite bogs. Because we have freezings and thawings, extremes of temperature unlike Ireland, it’s likely people wouldn’t have remained intact. The working title of the book is “False Mermaid,” which is also the name of a plant that grows in the Mississippi and will be a botanical clue. And I think that’s all I’m going to say about it.

October 31, 2008 by
Arts

A Salute to the Flag

Filmmaker John Foley of Wayne.

Filmmaker John Foley of Wayne.

A few weeks after 9/11, you couldn’t buy an American flag in this country. They were sold out, flying from flag poles, porch roofs, even car antennas from sea to shining sea. Seven years later, where are they?

Wayne filmmaker John Foley asked himself that same question not long ago.

“I was listening to some people who’d gone on a holiday in Europe and they were joking about how they told everyone they were Canadian. I thought to myself, why? What are you ashamed of? And it dawned on me that what the flag represented had changed since it was hoisted over Iwo Jima in World War II or even over Ground Zero. It had gotten lost. To many people, it had been co-opted or hijacked by the religious right or the Republicans, and all the sacrifices people had made along the way faded into the past and it became a symbol of what’s wrong with this country.”

At the time, Foley was in the midst of filming what would later become “The Color Bearers,” a film examining the history of patriotism as embodied by the symbol of the flag, from the Revolutionary War to the present day, which he also produced with childhood friend Steve Newbert. He’d begun the documentary as a personal tribute to a distant relative, James Seitzinger, a 17-year-old from Schuylkill County who lied about his age to join the 116th Pennsylvania Infantry during the Civil War. On the first day of the battle at Cold Harbor, VA, in June of 1864, the unit’s color bearer—the soldier who carried the flag into battle in front of the troops—was shot down. The young farm boy rushed forward to seize the flag and raise it, dropping his rifle to do so. For his bravery, Seitzinger received the Congressional Medal of Honor.

“When I started looking into it,” says Foley, “I found that of the 3,500 soliders in the entire history of the Medal of Honor, most of those who received the award had something to do with the flag during the Civil War—they were either color bearers or had captured the enemy’s flag. I started asking the experts, what’s the big deal about the flag capture? What it comes down to is that carrying the flag was a dangerous job. It required an inordinate amount of bravery and courage heading into battle, holding just a flag. You’re stepping into battle six feet ahead of your troops, the battlefield is filled with smoke, and there’s the flag popping out of the smoke. There were no radios or telegraphs on the battlefield. The only way to communicate what you wanted your troops to do was, as an officer, position yourself behind the flag and tell the color bearer what you wanted the troops to do, go left, right, forward, or back, and they just followed the flag. You became a bullet magnet. The life expectancy of the average color bearer in battle was six months. They had to drop their rifles to pick up the flag, and that’s what Seitzinger did.”

Foley found three other color bearers from the Civil War and not only told their stories, but found living descendants who talked about how their courageous ancestors affected their lives today. For example, the descendants of Union color bearer Ben Crippen—who include a police chief and Desert Storm vet from Guyton, GA—ritually return to the battlefield at Gettysburg to take a family photo under the statue of Crippen, a member of the 143rd Pennsylvanians, who was killed while his regiment was attempting to keep the Confederate army from entering the town. Crippen lagged behind his troops, which were engaged in a rear guard action, and would periodically turn to face the Rebels, only a few feet away, and shake his fist at them. Crippen was gunned down, but it was his act of defiance that rallied his troops, who kept the Confederates at bay.

But Foley felt the focus on war heroes made the film “too dusty, too History Channel,” so he also talked to other people for whom the flag has held great significance beyond the battlefield, including singer Lauren Hart, who performs the Star Spangled Banner at Philadelphia Flyers home games and never fails to think of her father, announcer Gene Hart, the legendary “voice of the Flyers;” Tim and Brian O’Connor, owners of Humphreys Flags, located across from the Betsy Ross House, which has been making flags since 1805 and created an American flag so large it didn’t fit on a football field; and Scott LoBaido, a New Yorker who painted flags on 50 buildings in 50 states as a tribute to America’s soldiers. Former Eagles star Vince Papale narrates the one-hour film.

Foley, who grew up in St. Dominic’s Parish in Northeast Philadelphia and graduated from Father Judge High School, took a long, circuitous route back to one of his earliest passions, TV and filmmaking. When he entered Temple University in 1974, he was a physics major, but switched to the radio-television-film . Unfortunately, for financial and other reasons, he had to drop out. He never graduated from college, but wound up in the telecommunications business, eventually as the CEO of a company.

But a few years ago, when the telecom industry started to implode, Foley made what seemed to be a good business decision. “One thing that hasn’t imploded, but has actually exploded, is content,” he explains. “Content is on the rise. So about five years ago, I said to myself, ‘Do I want to be scraping by well into retirement in the telecom industry until it’s dead, or do I cut my losses now and chase my dream?’”

The dream won. Today, he’s director of business development for PMTV (Producers Management TeleVision) in King of Prussia, a 20-year-old company that provides mobile facilities and production services for clients as varied as Home Depot and ESPN. He had a brief stopover as the world’s oldest intern too—working gratis for another Philadelphia production company, Teamwork Productions, writing and producing documentaries and TV pilots with an African-American theme.

Life has changed dramatically—in many ways. “I had a little money for a little while, but it’s been scary,” Foley admits. “Right now I’m earning half of what I earned as a CEO. It’s hard. I had a lot of nice rewards rising to the top of the telecom industry, but I’ve shed them now, the boats, the cars. . . .But I have a nice condo in Wayne and where I didn’t see a future in the telecom industry, I see a future now. And did I mention that I’m having fun?”

“Color Bearers” became his resume piece, allowing him to convince his new boss that he should hire a guy for TV production who had no real experience. “If it hadn’t been for this film, I wouldn’t have gotten this job,” he says.

The film, which premiered on June 14 (Flag Day) at the Independence History Museum on Third Street, has also opened his eyes about the ambivalent relationship Americans have with the symbol of their nation, he says.

Some of that began to surface while he was filming. One of the questions he asked each of his interviewees was “What is patriotism?”

“Tim O’Conner of Humphreys Flag, when I asked him that question, Tim went off on this riff on how we were creatures in the trees in Africa, and when we came out of the trees, we got together and basically protected one another. A patriot was someone who gave up his life for his tribe,” recalls Foley. “Well that particular day, I shot the segment on my lunch hour and was dressed in a suit and a tie, and Tim assumed that I was a staunch member of the religious right making a film about the flag. He was convinced that what he said would never make it to the film and he was laughing to himself. Of course, it’s in there.”

Foley laughs, but then suddenly becomes serious. “The fact is, you’re prejudged if you have a flag out. To many people, you’re automatically a hawk, and that is one of the very things we’re trying to combat with this film. Republicans and the religious right don’t own the flag. Americans own the flag. It’s lazy to jump to assumptions about people because of the fact that they’re proud to be an American.”

He wanted “Color Bearers” to restore the flag to its historical significance as a symbol of freedom for people who longed for it where they came from, but never found it until they arrived here.

“I wanted people to make the connection, through the story of the color bearers, that the flag wasn’t something to be ashamed of, to remember what had gone into giving us the freedoms we have,” he says. “You can burn a flag in this country without going to jail. If you want freedom of speech, you have to accept people who don’t believe what you do.”

The film has had a profound effect on those who’ve seen it. At a Temple University “teach-in” conducted by history professor Ralph Young last month, a screening before an audience of students, professors, and non-students, provoked a spirited discussion that went on for 90 minutes. “It was very interesting,” notes Foley, who attended the screening. “The students responded very positively, but people in their 50s and older took us to task for doing anything that glorified America and the flag. They were upset with me that we didn’t show more of the Vietnam era antiwar movement with people burning flags in protest. But we wanted it to be a positive film, and frankly, we only had an hour.”

Foley admits he made a conscious decision not to show flag-draped coffins in the film. “I found a lot of those images on military websites of funerals at Arlington Cemetery, but I felt like I was intruding on people in their deepest pain ever in life To put that into the film and sort of exploit the image felt wrong, and I just decided I wasn’t going to do it.”

What you will see in the film are photos of Foley’s son, Sean, now a Philadelphia police officer, who was deployed to Iraq in 2003-2004. Sean (“now there’s an Irish name for you,” laughs Foley) joined the National Guard prior to the Iraq war, like many young men and women, to make some money for college. “Now, I firmly believe that we were sold a bill of goods by Bush who didn’t do enough work to determine if there were in fact weapons of mass destruction over there, didn’t have the support of our allies, and didn’t really have a good plan. But when I was standing with his sisters and his mother at Fort Dix as he was leaving, I didn’t want to say anything negative to him that might cause him to hesitate at a crucial moment, a hesitation that could cost him his life. You can hate the war and love the soldier—I hope that was the lesson we learned from Vietnam.”

Instead, Foley removed a Claddagh ring he bought in Dublin “that really means a lot to me,” and handed it to his son. “I said, son, you bring this home to me. A year later, he pulled me aside, took the ring off, and handed it to me and said, ‘I told you I’d give it back, Pop.’ I get choked up now as I say this. I will never take this ring off.”

Then Foley, the historian, brought it all back to the flag. Just as he gave his son the ring, historically, soldiers were often given flags sewn by the women of their towns so they could take a little “home” with them to war and they were admonished to “bring it home proudly,” says Foley. “I gave my son the ring for the same reason, to let him know I was with him.”

Carolyn Blashek, founder of Operation Gratitude, the nonprofit group that sends care packages to service people deployed overseas, wants to carry on the tradition in a more modern way. “She called me up and said she had just finished watching the film and couldn’t stop sobbing,” says Foley. “Operation Gratitude has already sent more than 350,000 packages to troops in harm’s way, and they are going to do doing another drive for the holidays and they start packing this month to send packages addressed to 70,000 individual soldiers nominated by people on their website. She wants to get as many copies of ‘The Color Bearers’ to stick into the packages. So far we’ve raised enough corporate and individual sponsorships to send 600 copies.”

Foley says he’d like to donate 70,000 copies, but doesn’t have the money to create that many duplicates. You can help. If you go to the “Color Bearers” website, you’ll find information on how you can donate a pack of 10 DVDs for just $25 (one copy normally costs $24.95). That small donation will help remind a solider that he or she is also a color bearer, a living symbol of the land of the free, the home of the brave.

October 10, 2008 by
Arts

“Touch the Blind Man” and Other Poetry from Finbar Furey

Touch the Blind Man

Take my fiddle, take my bow
Use the gift to play them so;
Music spirit guard my son
Born of shadows—blind to some.
This fairy child, this fiddler boy
This music man of my gypsy kind.
God of trad protect his flame
And those who fall beneath his fame.

Beware gold bigots, pissy thorns
Rogues of nothing who cover all.
Distant peace hails in time
Future waiting, cradling mine.
Gifted nomad touching worlds,
This special man wrapped in curls
Sell your credits, lost your soul.

Touch the blind man
He’ll take you home.
Take my fiddle, take my bow
Use the gift to play them so.
Twist the keys and free my soul
And dark Rosaleen to wash us all.

—Finbar Furey, February 2008

Another Time

Slow days have passed us by
Foolish hearts how cruel to watch love die
Was it lies or just some stupid pride
When you were another woman
And I was another man
When life with so much love
Once filled another time

Staring out to empty space
Growing colder as the years increase
Getting old enough just not to cry
When you were another woman
And I was another man
Before the curtain closed
Forever on another time

The good times now rest in peace
With all the conversations one believed
It seems so long ago since we laughed or cried
When you were another woman
And I was another man
With all the dreams love promised
In our time.

—Finbar Furey

October 3, 2008 by
Arts, People

Local Filmmaker Revisits a ’50s Music Scandal

Shawn Swords with singer Bobby Rydell holding Swords' last release, Charlie Gracie: Fabulous.

Shawn Swords with singer Bobby Rydell holding Swords' last release, Charlie Gracie: Fabulous.

A couple of years ago, a young Irish-American filmmaker named Shawn Swords from Glenolden trailed a popular Irish-American band around and produced a critically acclaimed documentary called, “Blackthorn, It’s an Irish Thing,” which appeared on UPN.

Last year, Swords completed a documentary of Philly rock and roll pioneer Charlie Gracie, whose “Butterfly” knocked Elvis from the top of the charts in 1957 and sold more than 3 million copies worldwide—without benefit of the internet. “Fabulous” was picked up for World Wide Distribution by Oldies/Gotham/Alpha distribution and was a huge hit two summers ago during a PBS fundraiser.

This month, Swords, who went to film school at 32 and now steers Character Driven Productions (Conrad Zimmer, Blake Wilcox, Paul Russo), debuts a brand new documentary, this one on the American Bandstand Philly years with Dick Clark, on September 27 at the Wildwood By the Sea Film Festival at the Wildwood Convention Center.

But if you think “Wages of Spin” is a feel-good trip down memory lane with Bobbie Rydell, Chubby Checker, Frankie Avalon, Jerry Blavat, Justine, Eddie, Arlene and the other and all the other Bandstand dance regulars, you’re in for a shock. The same one I got when I caught Swords’ trailer on YouTube.

It opens with a black screen, like a chalkboard, on which is scrawled the word, “Payola,” with a definition for those who have no memory of the ‘50s music scandal, the origin of the term “pay to play”: “A secret or private payment in return for the promotion of a product, service etc, through the abuse of one’s position, influence or facilities.” Then you hear the voice of Artie Singer, who wrote the popular Danny and the Juniors’ hit, “At the Hop.”

“Where do you think Dick Clark made all his money? Initially where do you think he made it? From guys like me.”

Singer is looking at the off-screen interviewer. He raises his arms in the classic “but wait” move. “Granted,” he continues, “I can’t say anything derogatory. I can’t say anything bad because I owe my success in the record phase of it to Dick Clark.”

He had to “love the guy,” Singer tells the off-camera Swords, because without him, “there would have been No ‘At the Hop,’ no Danny and the Juniors.”

And by “without him,” Singer says, he means without Clark taking 50% of the publishing rights to the song. If the record producer hadn’t given it to Clark (as a gift, he later said, because they were friends) there’s a good chance that “At the Hop” would have gotten no play on what was the most popular teen program in the ‘50s.

Oh, say it ain’t so! America’s oldest teenager, the fresh-faced host who squeezed between two Philly teens every day from 3 to 4:30 PM to introduce the latest hit record or musical heartthrob, the guy who’s been counting that ball down on Times Square every New Year’s Eve? Dick Clark? Making hay to play?

To hear Swords tell it—and he’s talked to the players and read the transcripts—it was big time. He first came across the story when his friend, Paul Moore (formerly of Blackthorn, now of Paddy’s Well) asked if he was familiar with the story of Charlie Gracie. “Charlie was a talented musician, but he wound up being blacklisted back in the ‘50s, says Swords. “Charlie has a number one hit, at 19 years old, went on tour for a year, appeared on he Ed Sullivan Show, with [teen rock show DeeJay] Allan Freed, Dick Clark, then comes back home to Philadelphia and he’s not getting royalties. The record sold 3 million worldwide.”

Gracie discovered that Dick Clark owned 25% of “Butterfly.” Gracie sued the record producer and got $50,000, but that was the end of his career. Though he signed with a new label, he couldn’t get airplay. “He knocked Elvis off the charts and he couldn’t get airplay,” Swords says.

Digging deeper, Swords discovered that according to Congress, Clark was given somewhere in the neighborhood of 160 copyrights with the implied guarantee that those songs would air on Bandstand. But during the payola hearings before congress in 1960, Clark denied taking payola to play songs. In a New York Times article written at the time, Clark is quoted as telling the House Special Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight, “I have not done anything that I think I should be ashamed of or that is illegal or immoral, and I hope to eventually convince you of this. I believe in my heart that I have never taken payola.”

And in fact, says Swords, even if songwriters or producers never handed a fistful of cash over to Clark, he got paid. Instead, as was the case with “At The Hop,” he was given copyrights to songs, which meant that he benefited financially from their rise to the top of the charts. The New York Times report said that the Committee produced figures showing that over a three-year period, Clark had received $167,750 in salary and $409,020 in increased stock values, on investments of $53,773. That led one legislator to remark that if Clark hadn’t gotten payola, he’d certainly gotten plenty of “royola,” referring to royalties.

But by the time of he hearings, Swords says, Clark had divested himself of many of his holdings, including as many as 30 various businesses related to the record industry (as documented by Congress), so that the committee gave him nothing more than a slap on the wrist. Other DeeJays weren’t so lucky. Allan Freed lost his job and though he received only a small fine, his career was over; he died penniless at 43.

“Clark took the money from the divestiture and started Dick Clark Productions which became one of the most profitable independent TV production companies of all time,” says Swords.

While it took the filmmaker some time to uncover this chapter of the history of rock and roll, it really wasn’t hidden all that well. In fact, one of the producers of the film is John A. Jackson, author of the book that laid out many of the details, “American Bandstand: Dick Clark and the Making of a Rock ‘n Roll Empire.”

“John wrote a fantastic book, one of my favorite books, but it barely showed up on the radar,” says Swords. “Why isn’t more of this public knowledge?” One reason, he suspects, is that it’s hard to get corroborating evidence from some of the singing stars of the era, with whom Clark still has dealings. “Some of them are still getting checks from him for appearing in Branson [the Missouri musical destination where yesteryear’s idols play to packed houses of nostalgic audiences],” says Swords. Nevertheless, Swords has at least 7 interviews on tape, like Singer’s, detailing what went on, but that’s out of about five dozen interviews. “They would tell me what happened, but a lot of them just stopped talking when the camera was rolling,” he says.

While Swords admits he likes digging into “abuses of power,” he doesn’t want to be typecast as a muckraking filmmaker. As a boy, he attended Girard College where he watched “the epic films” on old projectors “because they could get better rates on the old films,” he recalls. “We wouldn’t see the first-run films like the karate movies everybody loved back then. But I loved those old films, great English pictures on Cromwell and Henry the Eight, the David Lean movies, like ‘Bridge Over the River Kwai,’ ‘Lawrence of Arabia,’ and ‘Dr. Zhivago.’”

“I like the art films too, and have a real affinity for John Ford films, which are very melodic and emotionally impacting. I love the great action films and the film noirs, where there’s a great story.”

It was those kind of narrative films Swords planned to make when he went to the New York at 32, after getting out of the Navy, working two jobs to put himself though New York Film Institute. In fact, he’s working on a new screenplay now. “I worked most of it out during the two hour walks I take every day,” he says. “The whole plot, twists and everything. If I could sit and write all the time I’d be pretty good. I can really kick them out. Right now I’m tightening up one of my better screenplays and working on a couple of pilots, including one that’s a black comedy.”

He has six finished screenplays that he’s going to shop in LA by the end of the year. “I’ have had two offers for talent representation,” he says.

And when we talked a few weeks ago, Swords was still putting the finishing touches on “Wages of Spin,” which meant weeks of “being nocturnal,” while readying the documentary for The Wildwood By the Sea Film Festival, which he co-founded with his executive producer Paul Russo. “I have black circles under my eyes,” he admitted.

Don’t let it be for naught. Check out “Wages of Spin,” Saturday, September 27, at the Wildwood by the Sea Film Festival. If you can’t make it to the shore, there will be four screenings of “The Wages of Spin” at The Elaine C. Levitt Auditorium, 401 S. Broad Street (Avenue of The Arts) at: Noon, 2 PM, 4 PM and 6 PM. on Saturday, October 11. Admission is $10 at the soor. Artists featured in the documentary will be present at screenings.

“The Wages of Spin” will run continuously from 5 P.M until closing on several screens at Rembrandt’s Bar and Restaurant, 741 N. 23rd Street in Center City, on October 18 with several music and entertainment industry notables in attendance.?Tickets are $30 and are available at the door.

September 26, 2008 by
Arts

A Look Behind the Scenes at “Long Day’s Journey Into Night”

Robert Hedley has been through it all before. Forty years ago, then a relatively new assistant professor in the theatre department at Villanova University, Hedley directed a production of Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”

It was the first production in Villanova’s Vasey Theatre and, by all accounts, a huge success.

Now Hedley—who has since moved on to become head of the Playwriting program at Temple University, co-founder of The Philadelphia Theater Company, artistic director of the Iowa Shakespeare Festival, and holder of the Barrymore Lifetime Achievement Award—is taking a fresh look at O’Neill’s master work in a new production at Villanova.

“Long Day’s Journey Into Night” is considered an autobiographical work, and it documents the torments and travails of a dysfunctional Irish-American family over the course of one day. It addresses some fairly well-known themes in Irish-American life, such as drink and Roman Catholicism. To summarize the play in such a Cliff-s Notes fashion, of course, does it a grave injustice

The play, which opens Villanova’s 50th season, runs from September 23 to October 5, 2008.

Hedley also serves as director of International Education for the School of Communications and Theater at Temple, which includes the Dublin program—so Irish themes do tend to resonate a bit.

We chatted with Hedley about the play, O’Neill, families—and Philadelphia’s large and appreciative Irish theatre audience.

Q. You first directed “Long Day’s Journey” at Villanova forty years ago. I’m told it was the first play staged in Vasey Theatre. Where were you in your career then?

A. I was a young assistant professor then. I was, I think, in my third year of teaching in the United States. I’m from Canada. I was moving into the Philadelphia area and got the job at Villanova. (He became the chairman of the theatre department.) It “Long Day’s Journey”) was the first play in the present theatre. Then, it was just a lecture hall with a high stage at one end and wooden fixed desks. We took over that space.

For me it was a tremendous experience, all in all, even though we were rushing to make that hall a do-able space for theatre.

Q. Tell us about that first show, 40 years ago.

A. I remember we had an unusually large Irish audience. I was surprised. Everyone in the play, of course, is of Irish descent. I never thought we’d find that particular audience. Night after night, those people would come up to me and talk to me about the play. I saw some of the same faces in the audience, every night.

Q. What does it mean to revisit the play so long after directing it the first time?

A. It’s a really powerful piece. Coming back to it after all these years, it’s [still] an extraordinarily intense look at a time in one family’s life.

Someone asked me whether I thought this play had a contemporary relevance. I said, it is probably more present now than it was 40 years ago. It has to do with morphine and addiction through medication, for example. (Mary Tyrone, the mother, is addicted to morphine.) That’s in the news today. And it’s about disjointed, disengaged families. It addresses questions like: How do you cope with family members not living up to your expectations, or following in your footsteps?

It’s such a human play. It’s the only play I know that is this intense among the four family members.

Then I went back to it, it was not only “present” to me, but I was frankly surprised at how contemporary it seemed.

Q. Why do you think this play has such a lasting presence?

A. What has sort of guaranteed its lasting is that it is really extraordinarily, brutally honest. People say things to each other that are pretty shattering. You have people who are suffering—in Mary’s case, because of addiction, or, in (son) Jamie’s case, because he’s never lived up to his father’s expectations. You look at that and how siblings are related, and it’s really powerful stuff. We go home exhausted.

Q. How else is this production different for you?

A. Last time, 40 years ago, I had a couple of professional actors and a faculty member up there, and a couple of students. It’s very much the same lineup (now) as before. Still, the productions are very different.

In the theatre 40 years ago, all the members of the audience faced the stage, and that meant that you were looking at it almost the way you look at a movie. For a director, that’s sometimes a lot easier.

In this case, though, most of the play takes place around a table, and with the theatre in its present configuration, were playing very far down front, There are audience members along the sides, and some practically behind us. That means that you feel like you’re really inside it. You’re very, very close. You can have the most intimate sort of things happening. You can have actors genuinely whispering and you can hear them just fine.

I love the notion that you have a play unfolding, and you are close enough to it to pick up the smallest nuances, the smallest flicker of emotion in somebody’s face.

Q. How did you get into theatre?

A. I’ve told this story many times.

My mother Wanted to be a concert pianist. She taught piano. My father was a pretty good musician, but he was also a painter and a photographer. My sister was a very good pianist. My brother had an opera program.

When I went to university, there was a requirement that you take one of the arts courses. Well, my family had covered all the other bases. There’s no way I was going to go into one of those areas that my family was already good at. So I chose a course in theatre. As soon as I got into it, it felt absolutely right. I was very, very comfortable in it. I just enjoyed everyday going into those classes.

For details on the Villanova production, visit the university Web site.

September 12, 2008 by
Arts

Portraits of Courage

Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowan, third from the left, with the Philadelphia contingent. They are, from left, John Joe Brady, Darby O'Connor, John Egan, Brenda McDonald, Tom Farrelly, Sean McMenamin, Vera Gallagher, Billy Brennan, and Vince Gallagher.

Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowan, third from the left, with the Philadelphia contingent. They are, from left, John Joe Brady, Darby O'Connor, John Egan, Brenda McDonald, Tom Farrelly, Sean McMenamin, Vera Gallagher, Billy Brennan, and Vince Gallagher.

By Brenda McDonald

As a photographer for the London Evening Standard, he took the famous back-lit photograph of a young nursery school teacher named Lady Diana Spenser, soon to become Princess Diana,  wearing a diaphanous dress revealing more of her slim figure than “shy Di” was comfortable with. Over his long career, Dublin-born John Minihan has become renowned for his pictures of the      rich and famous—along with England’s future “queen of hearts,” Minihan’s subjectshave included Gloria Swanson, Al Pacino, Ray Charles, Irish novelist Edna O’Brien and especially playwright Samuel Beckett, with whom the photographer had a special bond.

But Minihan also took beautiful portraits of many ordinary people. Some of those photographs, described by Irish poet Derek Mahon as “real people untouched by celebrity,” are in a special exhibit at the Irish Arts Center in New York called “To Love Two Countries.” All of the dramatic black and white images Minihan took are of Irish immigrants from Philadelphia, New York, and New Jersey who came to the US between the years of 1948 and 1967.

A special reception was held on July 15, attended by many of Minihan’s “real people” subjects. It was hosted by Irish Ambassador Niall Burgess and the Irish Arts Center in association with the Commodore Barry USN Irish Center in Philadelphia, the Aisling Irish Community Center in Yonkers, NY, the Irish American Cultural Institute in Morristown, NJ, and Irish American Society of Nassau, Suffolk and Queens, Moneola, NY.

Among the Philadelphians featured were John Joe Brady, Barney McEnroe, and Tom Farrelly from Cavan; Jimmy Meehan and Barney Boyce from Donegal; Sean Healy from Kerry, Maureen Healy from Clare, and Jerry O’Connor from Limerick.

In the publication distributed at the event, John Minihan expressed the hope that those who view the photographs see them as a testament to human endurance. He noted that what all of these people shared is their pride and a strong sense of who they are and where they came from. The importance of their faith and their Irishness was very evident to him as he visited them in their homes in New York, New Jersey and Philadelphia, talking over cups of Barry’s tea, as they described the tragedies and poverty that drove them from Ireland to make their new lives in America.

The special guest of the evening was Ireland’s An Taoiseach Brian Cowen.  This was his first official visit to the United States.  He told the group that it was no accident that he chose his first event to be the photographic exhibition.  He can see now, he said, why the Irish are so influential in the US today. “It is because of the seed sown by earlier generations.”

 He congratulated Mr. Minihan for capturing the spirit of Irish immigrants.  “Mr.Minihan’s exhibit tells 1,000 words,” said Cowen.  “The exhibit literally shows in black and white the fortitude of the people who left and made numerous cities what they are today.  It is an indication of the huge number of people who came with not much in their pockets but huge hearts.  That legacy will live on.  Ireland is everywhere.  We need to make sure that we are united as a people with faith, hope and commitment.”

Christine Quinn, speaker forthe NYC Council, congratulated the organizations that brought the exhibit together, especially the Irish Arts Center which she remembers as “the little art center that could.”  The city has invested $5 million in city government funds to help fund the center. 

Other dignitaries in attendance were Niall Burgess, Consul General of Ireland, Breandán Ó Caollaí, Deputy Consul General and Michael Collins, Irish Ambassador from Washington, D.C.

In addition, on July 16 Niall Burgess and his wife, Marie Morgan-Burgess,  hosted a reception in the Ground Floor Lobby of the Consulate General of Ireland’s office on Park Avenue to honor Cowen.  More than 500 people were in attendance to welcome him to the United States.  From the Philadelphia area were Michael Callahan, (First Vice President of The St. Patrick’s  Day Observance Association), Jim Coyne, (President Emeritus of the Irish Memorial of Philadelphia), Edward Last, (President of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick),  Bernadette Truhlar,(Treasurer of the Commodore Barry Club), Michael Campbell (Donegal Football Association) and Brenda McDonald (Board Member of the Commodore Barry Club).  

“To Love Two Countries,” commissioned and presented by the Irish Arts Center and the Consulate of Ireland, will be at the Irish Arts Center at 553 W 51st Street in New York through December 2008.

September 4, 2008 by