play

 

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.