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Dublin by Lamplight

Arts

Review: Inis Nua Theater Company’s “Dublin by Lamplight”

Jared Michael Delaney as "Frank and others." Photo by Katie Reing

 

Delight (noun):

1. Great pleasure; joy

2. Something that gives great pleasure or enjoyment.

3. Inis Nua Theatre Company’s current production of “Dublin by Lamplight.”

Take a little vaudeville, throw in a little silent film comedy the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, and Harold Lloyd, sprinkle liberally with cheap gags, commedia dell’arte makeup, and, because it’s Irish, a smidge of Republican sentiment (and we’re not talking the GOP here), and you have the recipe for one delightful evening at the theater. Even if the theater is a century old gothic church on Philadelphia’s Broad Street.

In Inis Nua Theatre Company’s production of the Michael West wild “Dublin by Lamplight,” six actors play 30 to 40 parts in white face, the only prop is a chair, and the painted backdrop plays a role for about six minutes. Still, your imagination takes you through the streets of Dublin, on stage and back stage at a turn-of-the-century theater, a dingy garda station, and the catwalk of a bridge, led by the actors who use broad gestures and a physicality just short of mime to bring everything you can’t see to life. The story is told in third person, with the actors describing each scene as they jump into it. Composer John Lionarons sits stage left at a piano, playing accompaniment, adding to the silent film ambiance of the play.

The story: In the early 1900s, Willy Hayes (Charlie DeMarcelle) is the proverbial starving artist (really starving) who is attempting to launch a new theater company, the redundant Irish National Theater of Ireland. To produce the debut play, “The Wooing of Emer,” he must woo the wealthy and the Republican-leaning feminist, Eva St. John (Megan Bellwoar), who is promised a starring role in both the play and Willy’s life. Willy’s brother, Frank (Jared Michael Delaney), is an actor and a drunk, not necessarily in that order. He is also a patriotic Republican who is only slightly torn between loyalty to his brother’s theater company and exploding a load of gelignite under the limo of the King of England who is visiting Dublin. Frank has been carrying on an affair with a young maid, Maggie (newcomer Sarah Van Auken), who is also erstwhile seamstress for the company. She is much coveted by Jimmy (Kevin Meehan), a young man with a rolling gait that suggests a birth defect or many years before the mast. Though the play needs no comic relief, if it did, it would be ably provided by Martyn (Mike Dees), an effeminate actor who is given many of the best lines.

As Willy and several other characters, Charlie DeMarcelle is a wonder. He brings impeccable timing and strong comic physicality to the part—slipping and sliding on the stage as precariously as if it were coated in ice.  He would have made Buster Keaton jealous. Jared Michael Delaney transformed himself so well and so often (Frank, a British undercover man, and several others) that it was hard to remember that one actor was playing many different roles. It takes more than a quick wardrobe change to pull that off—it takes acting, and Delaney acted the hell out of those characters. Mike Dees’s Martyn is hilarious, and Sarah Van Auken, as the maid who plays Eve to Megan Bellwoar’s Margo Channing (see: Bette Davis’s “All About Eve”) when Eva St. John is jailed for demonstrating in the streets, was just delightful.

And, I’m happy to say, so is this play. I’d see it again.

“”Dublin by Lamplight,” by Michael West, is directed by Tom Reing, artistic director of the Inis Nua Theatre Company. It runs until May 14 at the Broad Street Ministries, 315 South Broad Street, Philadelphia. To order tickets, go to the Inis Nua website. You can also call 215-454-9776.

 

Arts

The Roar of the Greasepaint

Actor Jared Michael Delaney, in character. Photo by Katie Reing.

Can six actors play 40 characters while wearing painted-on masks?

We’re about to find out. The Inis Nua Theatre Company’s production of the ground-breaking play, “Dublin by Lamplight,” opens on April 27 at Broad Street Ministry on the Avenue of the Arts in Philadelphia.

The play is set in 1904 when the King of England is paying a visit to Dublin where Republican sentiment is high and the atmosphere volatile. At the same time, a group of actors in the “Irish National Theatre of Ireland” are trying to put on a play called “The Wooing of Emer.” While the company producer is doing a little wooing himself—of a local rich woman who is leading protests against the British and whom he hopes will fund the play—his brother is gathering explosives to protest in his own way.

Inis Nua Artistic Director Tom Reing has been waiting a long time to bring the play to the US. He first saw it in 2004 when he was training at England’s Corn Exchange Theatre Company. Written by Michael West, whose “A Play on Two Chairs” was Inis Nua’s debut play, “Dublin by Lamplight” was directed at the Corn Exchange by Chicago-born Annie Ryan, who is also West’s wife. It wasn’t until Reing was able to get funding (and not by wooing any local rich women) that he was able to afford to produce a play with six actors. (And he’s not saving money by making them play 40 parts—it’s in the play.)

“It’s a dream come true for me,” Reing says. “This is the play that inspired me to start Inis Nua and we’re finally doing it.”

There’s more than a hint of Commedia dell’arte about “Dublin by Lamplight.” In the Italian style, the actors’ faces are painted to look like masks, so their characters and emotions are revealed instead by their voices, facial contortions and physical movements. It’s also true to Corn Exchange Theatre Company’s mantra, says Reing: “dancing on the razor’s edge between the grotesque, the heartfelt, and anything for a cheap gag.”

Funding for the play, which came from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage through the Philadelphia Theatre Initiative, the Wyncote Foundation, the Charlotte Cushman Foundation and the Independence Foundation, also allowed Reing to bring in musician and composer John Lionarons to provide an original score.

“The music underscores the entire piece. It makes it feel like a silent move soundtrack but obviously we have dialogue,” Reing says.

Though Inis Nua’s season of Irish, English, Scottish and Welsh plays are usually staged at the Adrienne Theatre on Sansom Street, “Dublin by Lamplight” will unfold in the Sunday school room of the Broad Street Ministry which now occupies the Chambers Wylie Presbyterian Church, a Gothic Revival Church built in 1901, right across from the Kimmel Center. The setting couldn’t be more apt.

“There are six archways on two floors where all the classrooms were and the center of the room where they used to have choir practice is what we’re using for the performance,” says Reing. “Since the play takes place in 1904, we’re getting a lot of mileage out of the setting. We knew we couldn’t use the Adrienne because the style needed depth and height. We use only one chair, our only set piece, with a backdrop. The physicality transforms the stage. There’s a lot of ambiance.”

And, like many Irish plays, it is “riotously funny,” Reing says, “and then at the very end. . .well, I’m not going to tell you.”

You won’t have to wait for it for too long. Preview night is April 26, and the play officially opens April 27 and runs till May 14. Tickets are $20, $25 and $30 and can be ordered online or by emailing the box office at boxoffice@inisnuatheatre.org.

The play stars Jared Michael Delaney, Mike Dees, Kevin Meehan, Charles Delmarcelle, Megan Belwar, and Sarah Van Auken. Makeup by Maggie Baker.

See more of makeup artist Maggie Baker’s magic here. Photos by Katie Reing. And go behind the scenes at Inis Nua’s blog.