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Review: Inis Nua’s “Pumpgirl”

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 .

January 14, 2011 by Denise Foley

Arts, News, People

“You Could Almost Feel the Sparks Crackling In the Air Around Her”

Melissa Lynch

“When it’s over, I want to say all my life  I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder  if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,  or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.”

~ Mary Oliver

Melissa Lynch wasn’t here long–she died in a car accident on December 30 at the age of 27–but no one would ever call her a visitor to this life. She grabbed it, embraced it, and, on occasion, frog-marched it where she wanted it to go.

A prolific actress—she appeared in more than 17 productions in Philadelphia—the Mayfair native was poised on the brink of her best year ever. She was engaged to be married on June 18 to William Seiler, a man, friends say, “she adored.” She had roles in four major plays, including one in which she was to play 8 different characters. Directors had started calling her. Even when she played smaller parts, reviewers couldn’t help taking note of her performances. In fact, said a college friend, Rebecca Godlove, “she could have a nonspeaking role in a play and still get noticed. In college, she played a mute child in a play and got rave reviews.”

Critics called her “dazzling,” “sparkling” and “luminous,” descriptions echoed by those who knew her, a powerful reminder of why actors have come to be called “stars.” But a reminder, too, that there are those among us who harbor an unquenchable inner light.

“She just radiates,” says Kathryn MacMillan who directed Lynch in her last play, the highly acclaimed production of Chekov’s “Uncle Vanya” for the Lantern Theatre Company. In fact, MacMillan says, she hesitated inviting Lynch to audition for the role she played, the “plain” Sonya, because Lynch was “too beautiful.

“She shone and there’s no dimming that and there’s no way I would want to,” said MacMillan. But MacMillan had seen Lynch play against type before—as the matted-haired, dirty invalid in Inis Nua Theatre Company’s production of “Bedbound,” a powerful work by Irish playwright Enda Walsh. “I could barely breathe all through that show, and yet through all the perfectly awful, disturbed misery, I found myself thinking, ‘she’s so amazing, she’s so amazing.’ For the first time I started to appreciate the range of things she could do. And I thought, if [Inis Nua artistic director] Tom Reing could make her ugly, why not?”

Her friend and frequent co-star, Doug Greene, who last appeared with Lynch in “The Duchess of Malfi” for the Philadelphia Artists’ Collective in September 2010, says that Lynch didn’t seek out the glamour roles, though they could have been hers for the asking. She was petite, with blue eyes and long blonde hair that she was perfectly willing to dye or hack if the character called for it. In “Bedbound” her face was smeared with sooty makeup and her usually sparkling teeth looked like a brush hadn’t been near them in a decade.

“She was a really beautiful girl and could have taken an easier road playing the beautiful girlfriend and wife, but she had a lot of depth as an actor and wasn’t satisfied just playing the girlfriend,” says Greene. Tellingly, though she was playing such a glamour role in “Duchess,” what reviewers saw in her portrayal of the conniving mistress of a Cardinal was “evil.”

But off stage, the only thing wicked about Melissa Lynch, her friends and colleagues say, was her sense of humor. “The first thing she would want me to say was that she was hilariously funny,” says Jared Michael Delaney, assistant artistic director of the Inis Nua Theatre Company, which produces modern plays from the UK and Ireland. “She had a really wicked and sharp sense of humor that could at times be terribly crude and at times incredibly clever.”

When her co-stars recall a performance with Lynch, it’s always marked by the memory of a recurring joke, usually made at their expense. Brian McCann, who played Lynch’s father in the poignant, violent, demanding play “Bedbound” last year, says she cracked him up before every performance when she would turn to him and mutter, “Now don’t f— this up for me.”

The other thing they recall is an outsized personality. “She was loud. She was opinionated. She loved to laugh and cause a scene. She could be as proper or as unladylike as you could imagine, depending on her mood,” her Clarion College classmate Rebecca Godlove wrote on her blog shortly after Lynch’s death.

And there was magic: “The girl was so passionate about everything you could almost feel the sparks crackling in the air around her,” Godlove wrote.

“I spent most of my time with her laughing and having a good time,” says Greene. “She was effervescent—and I don’t know too many people I would describe as effervescent. She had that ‘life of the party’ personality.”

She was also a true and loyal friend, a rare find in a world—the theater—that can be competitive, even cutthroat, and soul-crushing. “She was everything you want a friend to be—deeply loyal, but someone who would always tell you the truth, what you needed to hear whether you wanted to hear it or not,” says Delaney.

Many of those friends repaid that loyalty by waiting for hours on a cold winter evening in a line that stretched outside the Wetzel and Son Funeral Home in Rockledge and around the block, just to express their sorrow to Lynch’s family—father, Michael, mother, Madeline, and siblings Tina, Michael, Joseph and Theresa, and Lynch’s fiancé, Bill. And they were there the next day, at the gravesite in Whitemarsh Memorial Park in Horsham, where they joined her brother Joe in an impromptu and tearful version of “Danny Boy.”

Those who knew her as a friend admit that it’s been difficult coming to grips with the sudden finality of her death. “I’ve lost a lot of family members but this is the first friend,” says Delaney. “This is a new kind of grief for me personally.”

Those who knew her as a colleague, a co-star, or a character struggle with other feelings: Who will replace her? “To work with her is to love her instantaneously,” says MacMillan. “There are people who just saw her on stage and feel this loss. I know lots of actors who were looking forward to working with her. After ‘Uncle Vanya’ she came up to me and grabbed me by the shoulders and said, ‘I f’n love you. Can we do this again soon?’ And I said, ‘Yes, as soon as possible, please!’ I was so filled with the potential for this new friendship and a new collaborative relationship that I feel something important has been stolen from me, something that I wanted really bad.”

A remarkable, generous actress, Melissa Lynch was above all dedicated to her craft, one she chose as a child after seeing an ad for auditions for a local community theater. She starred in several musicals while she was a student at St. Hubert’s Catholic High School for Girls and in 25 productions while she was an acting major at Clarion.

“In school, most actors portrayed different intensities of themselves,” says Godlove. “Not Melissa. She had these moments of introspect when she was finding a character and it was magic. She could play anything and anyone. My last play in college was [Shakespeare’s] Henry V and the cast was almost all female. Melissa played Henry V and I played her comedic foil, her loyal Welsh sidekick who hated the Irish which was ironic since she played so many Irish roles. Watching her, you forgot she was a woman. You didn’t look at her and think, ‘that’s a girl playing a King.’ You thought, ‘that’s the young Henry V.”

Though she made it look seamless on stage, acting wasn’t effortless to Lynch. Inis Nua’s Tom Reing recalled her getting “crazed and panicked” by a part at first, “then she would see the humor in it and calm down.”

For her performance as a medical student in Inis Nua’s production of “Skin Deep,” by Paul Meade, Reing recalled, she had to jump rope while trying to memorize medical terms. “One day during rehearsals she came to me and said, very seriously, ‘Tom, I gotta talk to you.’ I thought she was going to tell me she got another gig with a bigger company, but she says, ‘I can’t jump rope.’ So she took the jump rope home and practiced memorizing her lines for that scene while jumping rope. I kept asking her about it and she said, ‘I’ll be ready for opening night, I’ll be ready for opening night.’ And she was.”

Lynch wasn’t above using the same methods that charmed critics and theater-goers to get what she wanted off stage either. Recalls Jared Delaney: “If she wanted something from you, you’d better do it. I wasn’t going to see her in her last play, ‘Uncle Vanya,’ because I don’t like the play and it’s 2-3 hours long. I told her, ‘Lynch, I’m sorry I can’t make it.’ She stood there looking at me, this tiny, beautiful blond girl. She put her hands on her hips and pointed at me and said, ‘You have to, I’m your girl.’”

He paused for a few seconds. “That’s why we’re dedicating the rest of our season to her,” he said softly. “She was our girl. And we loved her.”

See photos of Melissa Lynch both off-stage and on. Thanks to Doug Greene and the Lantern Theatre Company for their help in assembling these photos.

January 13, 2011 by Denise Foley

Arts

Review: “Bedbound” from the Inis Nua Theatre Company

Brian McCann and Melissa Lynch star in the Inis Nua play. (Photo by Katie Reing)

For an actor, playing a part in Enda Walsh’s “Bedbound” must be like running a marathon every night. For an hour and 10 minutes, its two players—a father and his crippled daughter, trying to sleep in the same cramped, filthy bedroom—are ranting, keening, or reacting silently to each other’s torrent of words with an intensity that seems ultimately unsustainable.

“Bedbound,” a production of the Inis Nua Theatre Company now playing at the Adrienne in Philadelphia, is the story of a man whose ambition, formed when he is very young, is to be king of the furniture business in Cork and, later, in Dublin. And he is willing to do anything, including the most unspeakable acts of perversion and violence, to achieve his desires. He delivers the story of his life—the violence, calculated sex, even marriage in the service of his dream–in agitated monologues aimed at the audience while his daughter, bedbound by polio as the result of a freak fall into a sewage tank, acts them out, playing the roles of the boss and the underlings her father has killed. Or has he? The unbelievable is somehow believable in this brutal and, yes, often funny play.

He had been grooming her to follow in his footsteps when she contracted the disease that has left her with a still, twisted arm, a hunched back, and paralyzed legs. His shame led to his nightly ritual of remodeling his home so that her room has become progressively smaller and smaller, as though he were building her a coffin. In that room, her now dead mother once slept beside her and read to her from romance novels, hushing her fears that the walls are closing in on her by telling her that it was “all a fairy tale.”

For the young girl, played in the Inis Nua’s production by Melissa Lynch, the stories, as horrifying as they are, are life to her. “What am I if not words? I am empty space is what I am,” she says. And it’s the empty spaces, the rare moments of silence, that bring the most terror to these two tortured characters who, in the end, turn to talk to one another, ending this emotionally exhausting play with an unexpected and poignant note of redemption and hope.

Brian McCann, who plays the father, deftly draws a character who is both despicable and strangely endearing, a psychopath with a sense of humor and, as McCann subtly suggests, perhaps even a heart of gold. Melissa Lynch’s performance as the physically twisted daughter of an emotionally twisted man is a tour de force. She ranges from helpless cripple to crotchety boss to obsequious underling to angry daughter so seamlessly that it’s as if she has multiple personalities constantly jockeying for center stage. Even when the father is raving loudly, your eyes are riveted to her face for her reaction, as though everything you needed to know was there.

Director Tom Reing has done a masterful job in bringing a difficult and demanding play to the stage. “Bedbound” is an emotionally taxing play for both actors and theater-goers, but is ultimately touching, satisfying, and memorable in the best possible way.

“Bedbound,” by Enda Walsh, runs through April 25 at the Playground at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom Street, Philadelphia, PA. For tickets, call 215-454-9776 or order online at the Inis Nua Theatre’s Web site.

April 16, 2010 by Denise Foley

Arts

Fringe Bonus: The Return of “Trad”

Charlie DelMarcelle and Mike Dees as "Da" and Thomas.

“Trad,” a play by Irish comedian Mark Doherty and a popular production by the Inis Nua Theater Company is returning to Philadelphia as part of the 13^th annual PhiladelphiaLive Arts-Fringe Festival in September.

A comic take on the hero’s journey, the play follows the path taken by Thomas, a 100-year-old Irish bachelor farmer and his even older “Da” as they search for the child Thomas sired 70 years before. In the course of their sojourn, they experience a little culture shock, much like someone who hasn’t been back to Ireland in the last decade or so might experience today.

“We’re incredibly excited to be part of the Philly Fringe and to bring ‘Trad’ back for another go-round,” says Inis Nua Artistic Director Tom Reing. “When we produced ‘Trad’ as part of the Live Arts Festival two years ago, it received a great response. We have such a good time with this show,we wanted to bring it back for a longer run, not only for the audience but for ourselves.”

In addition to performing in the Philly Fringe, Inis Nua will also be producing “Trad” in NYC as part of the First Irish Festival, running concurrently with the Fringe.

“It’s going to be a lot of work, but we’re really excited to be performing in both cities,” Reing says. “We’ll be splitting the weeks up, half in New York, half here at home.”

Playwright Mark Doherty’s radio credits include “Only Slaggin,'” “A Hundred and Something,” “Stand-up Sketches” and “The Bees of Manulla” for RTE, and “The O’Show” for BBC Radio 4. He has written for, and appeared in, various TV shows, including “The Stand Up Show” and “Back to the Future” for the BBC, and” Couched,” a 6-part comedy series for RTE. He has also workedextensively as a stand-up comedian and actor. He was the recipient of the 2004 BBC Radio Drama Award (Stewart Parker Award) for Trad. Doherty also wrote and starred in the movie,” A Film with Me in It.”

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, Skin Deep, Made in China ). Tom has also directed for (among others) Azuka Theatre, Shakespeare in Clark Park, Brat Productions and at the Walnut Street Theater.

The cast includes Barrymore-Award-winning Mike Dees as Thomas, Inis Nua favorite Charlie DelMarcelle as Da and Associate Artistic Director Jared Michael Delaney as Sal/Fr. Rice. “Trad” also features musician John Lionarons on hammer dulcimer, fiddle, accordion and tin whistle, providing live sound on stage.

You can see “Trad” at the Amaryllis at the Adrienne Theater, 2030 Sansom Street, Philadelphia on the following dates:

September 3 at 8 PM; September 4 at 8 and 10 PM ; September 9 at 7 PM; September 10 at 9 PM; September 11 at 9 PM; September 16 at 6 PM; September 17 at 9 PM; September 18 at 7 PM; September 23 at 8 PM; September 24 at 8 PM; September 25 at 8 PM.

Tickets are $15 and available by calling 215-413-1318.

August 27, 2009 by Denise Foley

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 Denise Foley

Arts

“Trad,” the Play, Makes Its Philly Debut

"Trad" director Tom Reing

In the play, Trad, by Irish comedian Mark Doherty, which will open September 12 at Philadelphia’s Mum Puppettheater, the character, old Thomas, a 100-year-old Irish bachelor farmer, sets off with his ancient “Da” to find the son Thomas fathered many years before in a short-lived dalliance with Mary, whose last name he can’t recall but who “had a certain stare on her.”

In this comic take on the hero’s journey, Thomas is the reluctant Don Quixote (fill in your favorite literary quester) who sets out on the road because his father, on his death bed, has been lamenting his lack of an heir. To the old man (make that older man), that means “the end of the name,” the end of everything. When Thomas confesses his apparently singular indiscretion to his dying Da, his father makes a remarkable recovery. “Get me my leg,” he orders, and the two men hobble off into the countryside in search of the lad, who is 70 if he’s a day–or alive.

On their way, Thomas and his Da encounter the realities of modern Ireland, a country now wired on coffee and wireless with Bluetooth, where the waitress serving you tea might speak Polish and those nice folks who moved into the McLaughlin’s old cottage emigrated from Abuja, Nigeria. Director Tom Reing (it’s a Cork name, he says) experienced a little of that culture shock between 2002, when he lived in Ireland on an Independence Foundation fellowship, and just recently when he met with the author of “Trad” in Dublin.

“In 2002, I stayed in a hostel, and when I was in the area again, it had been completely transformed into a Chinatown. Even the signs were in Chinese,” says Reing, a Penn graduate who used his fellowship to work with the Rainbow Theater Company in Belfast, a cross-community group for Catholic and Protestant children and teens. (He founded a similar company in Philadelphia’s diverse Gray’s Ferry neighborhood.) “The old Irish pub on the block was the only thing still in existence from my previous visit.”

Playwright Doherty mocks not so much tradition as he does those who cling to it. He’s like the modern Irishman who snickers (or bristles) when American tourists are disappointed not to find thatched roofs, craggy farmers, and barefoot beauties in a farmyard, but a bustling, thriving economy and all–good and bad–that Ireland’s new prosperity entails. When Da praises the Irish tradition of never giving up, Thomas retranslates this cultural precept as, “standing still and facing backwards.”

“The father is into tradition–Ireland’s old ways are the best ways–so the play examines tradition versus modernity, what you need to keep of the past, yet at the same time with the knowledge that you can’t stop change,” says Reing. But Doherty is a comic actor, so the play doesn’t take its solemn side seriously. Not in the least.

“He uses the stereotype of old bachelor farmers and takes it over the top and subverts it,” explains Reing. Although the Abbey Theater, which commissioned the work, is meticulous about regional dialects, in “Trad,” even the accents are exaggerated. “Not quite ‘ Lucky Charms’ but definitely not realistic,” laughs the director, who is also an adjunct professor at LaSalle University, where he is the resident theater director, and the founder of the Inis Nua Theater Company in Philadelphia, which is producing the play.

“Trad” is a perfect play for this fledgling company which Reing founded three years ago to produce contemporary works from Ireland and the UK. Inis Nua is Gaelic for “new island,” and Reing’s choices reflect a leaning toward the modern; don’t hold your breath waiting for him to direct “Playboy of the Western World.” Nothing against Synge–but a new generation of playwrights has its own take on the changing human condition.

Unfortunately, Inis Nua doesn’t have its own theater, so the company has had to improvise. The first Inis Nua play Reing produced and directed, “A Play on Two Chairs,” was staged at an art gallery. Fortunately, the play is performed on, yes, two chairs, so the production wasn’t expensive. Last year’s Fringe Festival entry, “Crazy Gary’s Mobile Disco” by Welsh playwright Gary Owen (the story of three guys stuck in the same deadend small Welsh town) was staged outside the upstairs men’s bathroom at the Khyber, a rock club and bar on Second Street. That led to some interesting improv.

“In the middle of a performance, someone from the bar got incredibly sick in there. No one mopped it up–they just threw bleach in. The actor was almost nauseous,” Reing says.

You can see “Trad” at the much more comfortable Mum Puppettheatre at 115 Arch, where, normally, the actors are made of cloth or plastic. “Theater space is at a premium,” says Reing. “But it’s a legitimate theater, with 100 seats, and we won’t have to endure bleach or anything.”

That’s good to know.

“Trad,” starring Mike Dees, Jared Michael Delaney and Charlie DelMarcelle, will run from September 12 through 15 at the Mum Puppettheatre at 115 Arch Street. Curtain goes up at 7 PM. Call 267-474-8077 for tickets or go to the Live Arts Festival website to order online. Price: $15.

August 29, 2007 by Denise Foley