Playwright Abbie Spallen
Northern Irish playwright Abbie Spallen was explaining how “Pumpgirl,” her award-winning play now in a two-week run at Philadelphia’s Adrienne Theater, can explore gang rape, infidelity, physical abuse, and suicide, and yet still get laughs.
“It’s the Northern Irish sense of humor,” said Spallen, a native of Newry, County Down, who appeared on the spare stage after the January 13 performance of her play, which is being produced by the Inis Nua Theatre Company. “People outside of Northern Ireland go, ‘Wow. That’s really mental.’ But it’s much darker than other humor, and it’s cruel. I have a friend who had a cold sore and had just had surgery on her foot. She walked into a bar with her crutches and then had to go to the bathroom. When she got back someone at the bar said, “Oh look, it’s hopalong herpes head’ and he didn’t even know her. There really isn’t any respect.”
But it’s clear that Spallen respects her characters, from the eponymous “pumpgirl,” Sandra (Sara Gliko), who works at the local petrol station in a Northern Irish border town, to her “pure class” lover, Hammy (Harry Smith), a part-time stock car racer whose moniker “No Helmet,” suggests that brain injury may be at least partially responsible for his oafish behavior, to Sinead (Corinna Burns), his long-suffering wife to whom Spallen gives her best lines. (“Sinead is me if I’d stayed in Newry,” Spallen confessed.) When Hammy slinks into bed beside her, Sinead notes that his lower lip puckers when he snores, something she used to find endearing but now makes her want to “put the hatchet through his head.”
In her monologue to the audience, Sinead wonders aloud: “How’s that for a country-and-western song, Hammy? I could call it, ‘And I’m Praying for a Female Judge.’” Spallen actually wrote two verses for the song which she sang for the Thursday night audience.
To Spallen, these three characters, who tell their stories in monologues, are “outsiders” in a place with a long history of intolerance for the different. The pumpgirl, described by one local as walking “like John Wayne” and looking “like his horse,” is frequently asked if she’s a boy or girl. (Gliko, who would never be mistaken for a boy, does manage to pull off “butch.”) Though his stock car wins ought to make Hammy the hometown hero, his name is butchered at the awards ceremony and his best mates ridicule him. One, an ex-con brute nicknamed Shawshank, is never seen but is an evil presence who orchestrates the ultimate betrayal. Sinead, the wife, is the sharpest of the three, funny, feisty, and full of potential that’s been snuffed by marriage to a callous, womanizing idiot.
The play is taut, made so by Spallen’s intent to reveal all to the audience before the characters themselves know what is happening. Spallen worked with the actors and with director Tom Reing during rehearsals, so this production may hit its mark better than some productions of “Pumpgirl” around the country. And it does hit its mark—as well as leave one.
Inis Nua Theatre Company’s “Pumpgirl” by Abbie Spallen will run through January 23, at the Adrienne Theater, 2030 Sansom Street, Philadelphia. Go to
http://inisnuatheatre.ticketleap.com/pump-girl/ to order tickets. This play is one of eight Irish plays that make up Philadelphia’s first Irish Theater Festival. You can save 20% by ordering tickets to two or more plays at the website, http://www.theatrealliance.org/irish-theatre-mixtix .