Arts

Bridget Reilly Beauchamp goes over lines with Jim Broyles.

You could say “The Weir” is about ghost stories.

You could say it’s about faeries, and the forts where they hid.

You could say, as playwright Conor McPherson once described it, that “just people talking.”

“The Weir,” opening Friday, October 17, in a bright, cozy little performance space on the second floor of a commercial building at 305 Old York Road in Jenkintown, is much more than that, says Bridget Reilly Beauchamp, founding director of Pulley & Buttonhole Theatre Company.

Beauchamp, who read the play and fell in love with it, says she has trouble explaining it because, on the surface, it might not seem like much more is going on than a gathering of people—as McPherson would have it, just talking.

Presiding over a rehearsal one night last week, Beauchamp explained as best she could. “Weirs are dams that don’t restrict water. The currents downstream from the weir can be deep, and they can pull you down. This play is about what you do when you go over the dam and hit the currents. At the end of it, there’s such hope. It’s like a new family has been found. There’s a sense that they have broken free of the currents.”

In “The Weir,” four men gather one night in a sleepy pub in Ireland’s dark countryside, and they’re joined by Valerie, a far more worldly-wise young woman from Dublin. And, yes, the evening begins with some creepy ghost stories, but the conversation turns darker as the young woman shares her own harrowing tale.

A review in London’s Guardian summed it all up pretty well:

“When the stories are spun from the men’s lives, they have a competitive edge—but Valerie has a story that can top them all. As Jack (Brian Cox), the grumpy, melancholic garage owner, proves in the dying embers of the evening, we are all haunted by different kinds of ghosts.”

Ultimately, “The Weir” is a story about the sadness and isolation of the men’s’ lives out in the back of beyond, but there’s a hint of redemption at story’s end.

Beauchamp, who grew up in Jenkintown, understands the closeness—sometimes too close—of small-town life, and it gives her an even deeper appreciation for the play. “Every ‘hello’ here has 40 years of life behind it.”

Her Irish background—her mother a Costello, her father a Reilly, and a birthday two days before St. Patrick’s Day, with its legacy of green birthday cakes—also plays a small part in her understanding of “The Weir,” even though she has never been to Ireland. “There is an ‘Irishness’ to it. You have faeries, of course. There is that sadness, but there is also perseverance.”

“The Weir” opens the season for this tiny company, which draws in a fair number of people who have never acted before. Its name, Beauchamp, comes from a line in a poem by Naoli Shihab Nye, “Famous.” This is the verse:

“I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous, or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular, but because it never forgot what it could do.”

Beauchamp fell in love with acting and the theatre while she was in high school, as she sat on a stage and watched people dancing around her. She went on to earn degrees in theatre and French from the Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales. “I always knew that’s what I’m supposed to be, and what I’m supposed to do.” She now makes her living as a theatrical dresser, and, although she describes her job as “fun and interesting,” something was missing. That’s when she and friend Kate Pettit co-founded Pulley & Buttonhole.

Working with local people, only a few of whom have acting background, is for Beauchamp a fulfilling part of the process.

Watching the rehearsal, you can tell that her actors feel the same excitement—and they’re quite good, and very convincing in their roles as the take up seats around a bar, replete with Guinness bottles—the fact that the taps are down is a source of some consternation for one of the characters—and bottles of Irish whiskey. (Not real, says Beauchamp.) They’re accents are not quite always spot-on, but for people with no experience on the stage, they come a lot closer to the real deal than many actors with more experience.

One of the cast members, Mark Schule, spent some time in County Sligo, and he developed a good sense for the rhythms and inflections of native Irish, and he shared what he knew with his fellow actors. Beauchamp kept them practicing, and she even told them to do something a little chancy. “Go hang out with people who don’t know who you are, use your accent, and see if they fall for it.”

The experiment apparently worked. The result is some fairly convincing, almost musical, but in no way over-the-top Barry Fitzgerald hammery. “I told them: We’re not doing Lucky Charms here.”

The Pulley & Buttonhole Theatre will hold about 60 audience members. You can be one of them. The play runs October 17, 18, 24 & 25. There’s no elevator access to the theatre space.

Learn more here:

http://www.pulleyandbuttonholetheatre.org/the-weir.html

Here are a few photos from rehearsal.

[flickr_set id=”72157648208925329″]

As World War I wore on, German zeppelin raids were making Nottingham in England’s East Midlands increasingly unsafe, so British Army Lt. Frederick Dietrichsen of the Sherwood Foresters Regiment sent his Irish wife to Dublin, along with their two children.

Dietrichsen, a lawyer in peacetime, was among the reinforcements sent to assist in putting down an armed insurrection in the same city. It was Wednesday morning, April 26, 2016, two days after a ragtag army of revolutionaries, led by a charismatic school teacher, Patrick Pearse, had launched what became known as the Easter Rising, the seminal event in Ireland’s long quest for independence from British rule.

Dietrichsen’s wife saw the troops marching up the street as they headed toward the Mount Street Bridge, a key entrance to the city, which was held by the rebels. Dietrichsen fell out for a brief, loving meeting with his wife and children, and then rejoined his men.

Less than an hour later, he was dead, one of the first British soldiers to be killed in the initial volley of shots from the volunteers, in what is now remembered as the Battle of Mount Street.

This was one of many poignant stories that riveted the attention of documentary director Keith Farrell and producer Dave Farrell as they conducted research for a new 90-minute docudrama, “A Terrible Beauty/ÁIille An Ufais,” which will have its world premiere September 6 at 6 p.m. at International House, just a few blocks from the University of Pennsylvania campus. The event is co-sponsored by the Irish Immigration Center , together with AOH Dennis Kelly, Division 1, Delaware County, and the Irish Easter Centennial Commemoration Committee.

The Farrells are not unfamiliar to Philadelphia audiences. Their recent film, “Death on the Railroad” shed new light on the suspicious circumstances surrounding the death of 57 Irish immigrants,who were working on a stretch of the Philadelphia and Columbia Railroad , near Malvern, in the autumn of 1832.

The new film takes a slightly different approach. It tells stories of the Rising from the perspective of the people who were there in Dublin during those bloody six days—the ill-fated Irish volunteers, British soldiers, and Dublin citizens.

“It became clear to me that to tell these stories, I would have to dramatize them,” says Keith Farrell, reached by phone from County Wicklow. “The characters speak to each other, and they speak to the camera as well. We see their actions in dramatic form. When the actors look at the camera, they’re speaking their actual words.”

Many of those stories paint a complex picture of people taken completely by surprise.

In a time of war, being dispatched to Dublin to put down a rebellion was probably the last thing Dietrichsen ever expected to have to do. He was far from alone.

“The British soldiers never expected to find themselves fighting on the streets of Dublin,” Farrell says. “They expected to be in France, fighting in the trenches. No one told them where they were going. To find yourself fighting in the second great city of the empire must have come as a shock.”

Everyday Dubliners caught in the crossfire were just as stunned, Farrell says—and in more than a few cases, outraged and completely unsupportive of the rebellion.

“The citizens of Dublin were not happy. Many had sons and husbands at war in the British army. (35,000 Irish soldiers serving with the British army would die in World War I.) They were getting separation allowances from the British government. When the Rising happened, they weren’t getting that money. All of the bakeries were closed. No one could get bread. The city was completely disrupted. No one could get to work, so no one had any money.

“There were huge numbers of civilian casualties in Dublin. (Many fell at the hands of the British. The worst atrocity occurred on Friday of that week, when soldiers of the South Staffordshire regiment murdered 15 innocent civilians on North King Street.) Dublin was devastated by the Rising. People said it looked like Ypres in Belgium. The citizens of Dublin paid a price. While it’s mythologized, it was really a difficult, dirty guerrilla war. I was like a mini-Stalingrad.”

Then there was the question of the volunteers themselves. “A lot of Irish Volunteers didn’t know there was going to be a rising. They thought they were just going out on maneuvers.”

After the battle began, Farrell says, the volunteers themselves were initially optimistic. That optimism didn’t last long. “I don’t think the leadership were optimistic. Even the ordinary guys realized pretty quickly that they didn’t stand a chance. They probably would have been proud that they held out six days.”

Farrell culled his stories from a variety of sources.

He found one particularly rich treasure trove. “Between 1930 and 1940, the Irish Army interviewed survivors of the Irish war of independence. That included British soldiers, members of the Royal Irish Constabulary, anyone who was involved. They transcribed them, and stored them in army archives.”

Obtaining access to an accounting of the North King Street massacre wasn’t easy. Decades after the fact, the report was sealed. Farrell filed a freedom of information act request to get the painful details released. The report had been shielded by a 100-year rule. “There I suddenly had access to accounts from Dubliners on the north side of the city, ordinary citizen accounts. Women who lost their sons, wives who lost their husbands.”

Farrell also tapped into the memories of two brothers who fought with the volunteers. “They fought together in the Battle of North King Street. As old men, they never talked about the war to their sons, but they left their accounts with other people.”

The story of the Rising, Farrell says, continues to resonate with the Irish. 1916, he says, was “a bit like your Battle of Bunker Hill. It was a loss for the rebels, but it was an iconic moment. It was the beginning of our war of independence, and that’s why it captures our imagination.”

The Irish audiences are completely aware of the complexity surrounding the events of those few bloody days in 1916, but some Americans might be surprised what they learn from this new film. They might not be aware of all of the back-stories—stories that can only be told by the people who were there.

“What I try to do is try to tell the human side. Even the ‘bad guy’ has a complicated background. There’s a tendency to make it all black and white. You can mythologize a lot. What I wanted to show was people affecting people affecting people. I don’t try to make a postscript to say whether it’s good or bad. I leave that up to the audience. ”

Siobhan Lyons, director of the Irish Immigration Center, has seen a sneak preview of the film, and she regards it as essential viewing.

“It’s a fantastic film. It’s really, really good. Even for, me, I feel like I know quite a bit about the Easter Rising. I know a lot about the politics, and the importance of the Rising, but I had never thought as much about the battles. You can still see bullet holes at the General Post Office (the epicenter of the revolt). You can just imagine the bullets flying. When you see it dramatized, you see what it really meant. It’s a must-see for anyone who calls themselves Irish in Philadelphia.”

Tickets are $50. They include an after-party at St. Declan’s Well on Walnut Street, with music by well-known local singer Marian Makins, who is putting together a playlist around 1916, together with flutist Paddy O’Neill. The new Irish Vice Consul Anna McGillicuddy will also be there.

• Information and tickets here.

A TERRIBLE BEAUTY… background to story. from Tile Films Ltd on Vimeo.