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Arts

Definitely Not the Whole Truth

A scene from "The Walworth Farce."

Tom Reing, artistic director of the Inis Nua Theatre Company, recalls the moment when the curtain came down on one of the earliest performances of Enda Walsh’s dark comedy, “The Walworth Farce.” He looked at his four actors and thought to himself, “it looked like they had just run a marathon.”

“The Walworth Farce” is a study in complexity. It is a play within a play in which an Irish father and his two sons, who left Cork for a dismal life in a London council flat, daily re-enact the stories behind that flight … stories that are not all true. This bizarre performance is interrupted by the arrival of a supermarket employee toting a bag of groceries one of the sons left behind at checkout.

To hear Reing tell it, it’s easy to understand why this play exacts such a toll on the actors. Bill Van Horn plays Dinny, the father; the sons are played by Harry Smith as Blake and Jake Blouch as Sean. Hayley is played by Leslie Nevon Holden.

“‘Farce’ is very quick. If it’s slow, the comedy doesn’t work. And you have these eruptions in the play within the play. There’s very high emotion, and very high-tension themes. The actors are running around and moving from room to room to do different scenes. One of the actors (Harry Smith) has to play all three women, and he has conversations with himself.”

Even the set is complex, he says.

“It takes a lot of work to make their flat look decrepit. These guys don’t clean… it’s three men. The set has a working sink and a working refrigerator. It has a tape recorder that they use on stage. There is a wireless signal in it, and it’s connected to the computer that is connected to our light board and sound.”

There are plenty of props, too, courtesy of Reing and a March trip to Dublin. While there, he packed a bag with Tesco (a supermarket chain) bags, spreadable cheddar, Mr. Sheen (a floor and furniture polish), and Pink Wafer biscuits.

Reing regards “Walworth” as a natural for Inis Nua, which presents contemporary works from Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales. The company previously presented Walsh’s harrowing “Bedbound.”

“Enda Walsh is really hot right now,” says Reing. This play seemed like another great example of his work. It happened serendipitously. He (Walsh) was just nominated for a Tony for his stage adaptation of ‘Once.’”

Reing finds the theme of “Walworth” fascinating. We all tell ourselves stories about our lives, but those stories don’t necessarily reflect the whole picture. “You embellish,” he says. “You tell the story so it’s favorable to yourself.”

So maybe it isn’t the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. The complete, unvarnished truth about ourselves might just be too hard to live with. One line from the play sums it up best for Reing:

“‘It’s my truth, and that’s all that matters; it’s what you do to keep going on.”

The play runs through May 27 at First Baptist Church, 1636 Sansom St., in Philadelphia.

Tickets here:
http://inisnuatheatre.ticketleap.com/walworth-farce/#view=calendar

May 11, 2012 by Jeff Meade

Arts

Philadelphia, Here They Come

Leaving Ireland, with regrets.

Philadelphia is already blessed with one theatre company, Inis Nua, dedicated to presenting Irish and Celtic works. Perhaps as proof that you can never have too much of a good thing, we now have another: Irish Heritage Theatre, which presents its first play, Brian Friel’s well-traveled (but well-loved) “Philadelphia, Here I Come!,” May 5-May 20 in Walnut Street Theatre’s cozy Studio 5.

Of course, some people may ask: Do we really need two companies? The answer, from actress and Irish Heritage Theatre spokesperson Kirsten Quinn, is an unequivocal “yes.” The reason? Each company takes a different approach to Irish theatre.

“Inis Nua does contemporary pieces, but we try to stick to the classics,” Quinn explains. “We’re interested in presenting classical Irish plays. This play we’re doing now is as recent as we will get. It was written it the 1960s. We probably won’t go further forward.”

Quinn also points out that Tom Reing, artistic director of Inis Nua Theatre, is an honorary IHT board member.

The Irish Heritage Theatre has been a long time coming. Founding member and artistic director John Gallagher came up with the idea for the company about a year and a half ago, Quinn says. Other Philly theatre people quickly came on board.

“John had worked for the Irish Repertory Company here in Philadelphia. (The Rep ceased operations in 2006.) John really felt like he wanted to continue that (the Rep’s work), but to bring the focus on looking at Irish heritage, and what that means. We want to introduce younger audience members to these plays, and reintroduce older audience members to plays they haven’t seen them for a while. Since there is no other company in the vicinity doing this, we really felt that there was a gap to be filled.”

After Gallagher came up with the idea, planning began, and non-profit status was secured. One of the biggest challenges, Quinn says, was finding a theatre space IHT could afford. Walnut Street Theatre’s Studio 5 proved to be ideal.

“There’re very few spaces in Philadelphia for theatre, believe it or not. The Walnut is subsidized, so they don’t have to worry as much about the overhead, and they can rent the space out to companies for less than other buildings in the city, which is great. They’re really supporting small local theater doing that.”

Evidently not content merely to launch a new company, IHT decided to debut with “Philadelphia, Here I Come!,” a particularly ambitious work, featuring 14 actors.

Friel’s landmark tragicomedy was first performed in Dublin’s Gaiety Theatre in 1964, and it’s been a popular offering ever since. “Philadelphia, Here I Come!” follows the last moments of protagonist Gareth (Gar) O’Donnell in Ireland—specifically the fictional village of Ballybeg in Donegal—before he departs for America. Much of the action focuses on the relationship between Gar and his father, who evidently have spent a lifetime together without connecting emotionally—even though it’s clear they love each other. What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.

Quinn plays the part of Gar’s one-time girlfriend Kate Doogan.

“The play is a lot of fun,” Quinn says. “The are comic moments to it, but also sad ones. It has very rich characters. There are so many characters, and yet they’re still very well constructed.”

“Philadelphia, Here I Come!” is the first of what the company hopes will be two plays produced this year. Two seems like a nice round number for future years, as well, says Quinn. From this point forward, expect to see productions drawing on the works of Yeats, Casey, Synge, and more of the classical Irish or Irish-American dramatists.

For now, though, Quinn relishes the launch of a grand new theatre company and the debut of its first play.

“For me, it’s huge. We’ve been in the works for such a long time, so it’s exciting to get ready to move into the space, and watch all these actors work, and see this thing coming to life. We’ve certainly undergone a lot of changes, and we’ve hit road blocks, but we just kept moving. It is incredibly gratifying, it really is.”

April 27, 2012 by Jeff Meade

Arts, Music

Craicdown 2011

Martyn Wallace, your emcee.

The upstairs stage at World Cafe Live regularly shines the spotlight on talented musical artists. The actors, singers and musicians who headlined the 2011 Craicdown benefit for the Inis Nua Theatre Company on Tuesday night had to have been among the most creative.

Inis Nua presents plays from Ireland, Wales, Scotland and England. The performers who took the stage Tuesday night were in one way, shape or form associated with the theatre company.

Some of the musicians, like actors Jake Blouch and Damon Bonetti, seized the opportunity to claim rock star status, replete with shredding guitar solos. Others, like New Zealander Rosie Langabeer, took a much more theatrical approach, at times verging on cabaret. (The Proclaimers’ “I Would Walk 500 Miles” on accordion—whoda thunk it?)

Presiding over the night’s festivies was actor Mike Dees in the guise of character Martyn Wallace from “Dublin by Lamplight.”

It was all good. Sorry to say we couldn’t stay for the whole show, but we’ve captured many winning moments.

December 9, 2011 by Jeff Meade

Arts

A Director’s View of “Woman and Scarecrow”

A woman lies on her deathbed, time ticking away, the end imminent. As she comes face to face with her mortality, she nurses regrets, mourns missed opportunities and contemplates the nature of her complicated marriage to a unfaithful husband. She is accompanied on her final journey by a friend, unseen to others, who is both comforter and critic.

Like most quick summaries of a complex piece of art, this bit of shorthand doesn’t do justice to Irish playwright Marina Carr’s ultimately redemptive “Woman and Scarecrow,” on tap for Villanova University’s Vasey Theatre November 8 through 20. “Woman and Scarecrow” has been described by reviewers as “spirited,” “biting,” “poetic” and “fierce and funny.”

(Hey, it’s Irish. It’s about death. Of course there are laughs.)

The play is not the first visible evidence of a unique new educational exchange program between Villanova’s well-known Irish Studies department and the Abbey Theatre, the national theatre of Ireland, but it might boast the highest profile. Described as “an historic intellectual/artistic partnership,” the new exchange program will expose Villanova students and outside audiences to renowned Irish actors, directors and writers; at the same time, Villanova students will travel to Dublin to study and work with the Abbey Theatre.

Directing “Woman and Scarecrow” is actor-friar Father David Cregan, O.S.A., associate professor and chair of the theatre department.

We talked to him about the play and the new relationship with the Abbey Theatre.

Question: Tell me about this play. What is it about to you and why do you like it?

Answer: “Woman and Scarecrow” has all the best qualities of an Irish play. It has a powerful story, it’s written with a kind of poetic prose that is indicative of the Irish dramatic tradition, and it also balances the comic and the tragic elements of the human existence in quite an epic way. That makes it a shining example of Irish theatre. The ability to both laugh and cry and to celebrate and mourn simultaneously—that’s part of the Irish aesthetic in general.

The play was attractive to me because of the epic way in which it deals with the really important questions of life and death. It allows the audience to enjoy a powerful story that simultaneously has a prophetic message about how to live life to its fullest, how to value oneself and how to live in the right relationship with the world. It tells the story through a series of tragedies and triumphs, through a series of failures and accomplishments in the life of Woman. But the play also has a sort of transnational quality in the way that it speaks to the human condition. It’s not only the Irish condition. It allows us to witness the last moments of this woman’s life as she tries to reconcile herself with her choices and deals with the repercussions of her mistakes.

Question: You’re an actor-director, but you’re also a priest. How do you look upon this play from the priest’s perspective?

Answer: It confirms something that both religion and theater share in common. If you’re familiar with the Roman Catholic creed, the line in the creed that really calls out to me is this one: “We believe in the seen and the unseen.” This play, while it tells a very specific story, has a kind of global outreach in the sense that it articulates both the seen and unseen qualities of what it means to be a human being, and it really connects the spiritual and the material in the way that it builds the relationship between Woman and the Scarecrow. The question in the play is, who or what is Scarecrow? Scarecrow appears on the stage for the entire production, and is physically and metaphysically connected with Woman, but she’s another element of her. The other characters in the play, when they come into the room, don’t see or acknowledge that Scarecrow is there. It’s kind of an embodiment of the spiritual component of the human condition. Scarecrow is not just her conscience, not editing or condemning her for a licentious lifestyle, but is pointing out to her that the mistake she made was in not valuing her life in the way that she should have; that her mistakes were that she didn’t treat herself well. [In this way, Scarecrow] helps woman cross from the world of the living into death. Those are the kinds of things they talk about the whole play. The play has an acknowledgement of the ethereal—or as I would describe it, of the spiritual—that definitely connects with my larger worldview of spiritual responsibility.

Question: Did Villanova’s theatre department choose this play, or was it a more collaborative decision with Abbey Theatre? And what role did the Irish Studies department play?

Answer: When the relationship with the Abbey Theatre began to materialize, we started to think of ways of making a connection. “Woman and Scarecrow” was a natural fit for me because my research and my writing is all in the area of contemporary Irish drama. I was interested in the potential and the power of the play. So many of the themes in the play are important Irish themes about returning home, and in particular returning to the West of Ireland and its curative and humane qualities. They speak of homecoming. Homecoming is not just about the connection to place or earth; it’s also a kind of spiritual reckoning.

Question: Marina Carr was a Heimbold professor at Villanova in 2003. Did that have anything to do with the choice of this play?

Answer: We’ve been connected with her work; we’ve produced it before. She was a friend of the department. This particular piece of work in my opinion is a triumph in her writing, a high point in her career, even though it’s a relatively small play.

Question: You’re an Irish fella. What’s appealing to you about doing Irish Theatre.

Answer: What I love about the Irish theatre is its courage, the exploration of deep emotion, and its interest in the journey of the soul and of the mind. This play contains all of that. It’s an actor’s dream come true because of the breadth of its emotional expression, and it’s a director’s dream come true because the script is so beautifully and poetically written. It really exhibits a kind of emotional complexity that is part of Irish artistic expression, a kind of courage to look at the harder, darker things. That’s one of the things I love about Irish plays—it’s the deep feeling at the center of it all.

irishphiladelphia.com readers get a 50 percent discount on tickets. Click on the Direct Ticketing Link or call the ticket office at 610-519-7474 and use the code IRISHPHILLY.

November 4, 2011 by Jeff Meade

Arts, People

5 Questions With Colin Quinn

Colin Quinn (photo by Carol Rosegg)

History class is in session. It’ll only take 75 minutes, but at the end you’ll know everything.

You’ll know how empires rose and fell. You will learn how the British conquered the world through the sheer force of their withering contempt, why the Chinese just couldn’t stop building that wall, and why there are fewer countries more irrelevant than Australia.

And it’ll all be lots funnier than history as taught by Sister back in the fourth grade. She was a humorless cow, anyway.

“Long Story Short,” Colin Quinn’s acid interpretation of the events that shaped great nations and then brought them to their knees—punch-drunk, bewildered and condemned to keep committing the same disastrous mistakes over and over again—comes to the Susanne Roberts Theatre this week. The one-man show, directed by Jerry Seinfeld, runs from June 28 through July 10, 2011.

You’ll remember Quinn from his five-year stint on Saturday Night Live. His face redefines the meaning of craggy, and his widow’s peak carves out an impressive capital letter M across his forehead. Quinn has amazingly literate comedic sensibilities, and he offers up some head-spinning observations on the human condition, but the lines are delivered in a streetwise Brooklyn-ese, with a voice that sounds like a truck dumping a load of crushed rock. He stalks the stage (with a crumbling Roman amphitheatre as a backdrop), making some astonishing points as he goes along. For example, a riff in which he compares Antigone of Greek mythology to “Jersey Shore’s” self-obsessed Snooki, or re-envisioning Caesar as Goodfella mobster Ray Liotta. The show is fast-paced—in Quinn’s world, each empire rises and falls in about ten minutes’ time.

Of course, you’re not meant to take any of it seriously. Scott Brown, writing for New York Magazine, recalled a quote from director Seinfeld in which he described the making of “Long Story Short” as “taking a fatuous premise and proving it with rigorous logic.”

We chatted with Quinn by phone this week, and here’s what he had to say about the show and his Irish-American upbringing.

Q. A headline for the Hollywood Reporter review described your show like this: “The History Channel meets Comedy Central.” It was actually a pretty good review, but that kind of Hollywood pitch line description doesn’t really measure up to what you’ve done. The history of the world in 75 minutes is an Olympian task. How hard was it to pull all of that material together and make all the connections?

A. It like to play around with this stuff, anyway. I always think in terms of “combinations.” It’s always in my head somehow. It’s all people stuff to me. Altogether, it took a few months to bring together—different hours, different times.

Q. If you’re going to talk about the British Empire and the Roman Empire (and more), you really do have to have some sense of history. You couldn’t have tackled the “demise of empires” with just a Cliff’s Notes knowledge of history. So I suppose I could put this more delicately, but how did you get so smart?

A. Most of it, I feel like its common enough knowledge. And we (comedians) have a lot of free time. We can read any time we want. I read a lot. I don’t reads that much history—I was never all that interested in history. I’m really more interested in the global village. I feel like everything else. These connections have been going on since time began.

Q. For those who haven’t seen the show, how did you figure out that you could make the connection between Antigone and Snooki?

A. That junction is just based on the fact that what people used to watch is not like what people watch now. (Now) we see Snooki crying on her knees over the loss of her cell phone.Most people wouldn’t know who Antigone is, but I went to a few acting classes so I know my stuff.

Q. You’ve probably been asked this before, but did you have any qualms about how or whether stand-up translates to a long-running Broadway monologue—the kind of story-telling that has been compared to the work of Spalding Gray? What were the challenges?

A. My own form of comedy is long-form, rambling comedy. I just wanted to do something thematic for a change of pace. To me, that was really like a natural state. It wasn’t like I was doing a bunch of one-liners before that, anyway.

Q. We’re an Irish web site, so of course we need to ask you something Irish. Happily, you’ve already gone there with an earlier show, “Colin Quinn: An Irish Wake.” And here again you’ve been lauded for your story-telling powers. The New York Times review described you as a kind of modern-day incarnation of the Irish “seanchai.” (“Story-teller,” in the Irish language.) You grew up in Brooklyn, coming from an Irish family, and knowing a lot of the local Irish–evidently providing you with a wealth of material. Can you tell us how growing up Irish influenced you?

A. Irish people, they like to read more than most people. I feel like that helps a lot. And I feel like Irish people are very verbal. I definitely feel like my Irish blood helps me to be a performer and a writer of comedy.

For more information on the show, check out the Philadelphia Theatre Company Web site.

June 23, 2011 by Jeff Meade

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.

April 15, 2011 by Denise Foley

Arts

Preview: The Pride of Parnell Street

Kittson O'Neill and David Whalen

The watershed moment in Joe and Janet Brady’s ostensibly happy marriage comes when Joe returns home from Ireland’s 1990 World Cup defeat to viciously attack Janet.

Sebastian Barry’s “The Pride of Parnell Street” is harrowing stuff; a tale of love perhaps never completely lost, and redemption. The couple’s turbulent history is methodically revealed in alternating, interwoven monologues by Joe and Janet. It is more like picking at a scab than exposition.

The events of “Pride” unwind against the backdrop of an ever-changing Dublin, and Joe and Janet’s story has a distinct, direct Dublin accent—about as subtle as a brick tossed through a shop window—and yet it remains delicately nuanced, darkly humorous, starkly beautiful. In Barry’s hands, a New York Times reviewer noted, this “rambling, vernacular talk assumes the music and patterns of poetry.”

Harriet Power was one of the first to read some of Barry’s powerfully moving lines. Power is a professor of theatre at Villanova who befriended Barry when the playwright served as the Heimbold Endowed Chair in Irish Studies at the university in 2006. They became good friends during his stay, and one day he asked her if she wanted to read a first draft of a new play—this new play, as it turned out. The language and emotion, she recalls, fairly leapt from the page. “I said, before I die I will do this play.”

Power’s bucket list wish is being granted. Wearing her other hat—associate artistic director at Act II Playhouse in Ambler—Power is preparing to bring this penetrating play to life later this month. David Whalen portrays Joe; Kittson O’Neill, in her Act II debut, plays Janet.

For Power, her friend’s use of the language is transcendent. “He’s really, really good at capturing what the soul sounds like,” she says. “He captures the poetry in the everyday without seeming to do anything at all.”

Of the two, Janet is the more successful survivor. Joe has weathered countless failures and indignities, and spends the play speaking from a hospital bed.

What appealed to O’Neill about her character was the shining spirit that lay beneath surface ordinariness.

“She’s a cleaning lady in a factory,” she explains. “She’s a single mom with two kids. She does not bear the external markers of success. What makes her exceptional is that she has a mind that is wide open to the world and the joys in it.”

Clearly, the deeply troubled Joe obviously is least sympathetic. Says Power, there is something about him that says, “I dare you to feel anything but repelled by me.” But even here, she adds, Barry has left open the possibility of forgiveness, if not a second chance—even when you’ve really blown it.

Whalen concurs. What Joe has done, he says, “was a terrible mistake. It (domestic violence) happens more often than we might say.” Given the nature of that “terrible mistake,” he adds, it’s difficult to see how any of it could end on anything other than a dismal note.

And yet, some sparks of love still unite this couple. For Whalen, that is what most appeals to him about “Pride.”

“For me, this play is such an incredible, transcendent love story,” he says. “When I read it, it blew off the pages for me. The last moment of this play always gets to me.”

And we’ll leave that last moment for you to discover on your own.

The show runs from March 22 through April 17. Details here.

March 11, 2011 by Jeff Meade

Arts

Review: A Skull in Connemara

Stephen Novelli as Mick Dowd and Jake Blouch as Mairtin--and skulls. Photo by Mark Garvin.

The Lantern Theatre Company’s production of “A Skull in Connemara,” is, to quote one of its quirky main characters “a great oul night. Drinking and driving and skull batterin’. . .”

In fact, if you happen to be in the first row, you might want to bring some protection—a la watermelon-smashing comic Gallagher—from the flying bone shards during the hilarious scene as two drunken Irish gravediggers with wooden mallets make sure that two skeletons do indeed return to dust.

In the second part of Martin McDonagh’s Leenane trilogy (“Beauty Queen of Leenane” and “The Lonesome West” bracket it), “A Skull in Connemara” tells the story of Mick Dowd (Stephen Novelli), who picks up the odd piece of change from the parish priest by digging up bodies in the church graveyard and disposing of them so there’ll be room for the newly dead. We arrive as Mick is within distance of the lovely bones of his wife, Oona, who died, we learn, as the result of a “drink driving” accident seven years earlier with the poitin-addled Mick at the wheel. He paid his debt in prison, but returned home to be haunted by the rumor that he’d murdered her and used the accident to cover it up.

Assisting Mick is a local young miscreant and dimbulb, Mairtin (Jake Blouch), whose granny MaryJohnny (Ellen Mulroney), likes to saunter down to Mick’s cottage after a successful night of Bingo for a sip of the good stuff that Mick has aplenty, trade a little gossip, and nurse old resentments (she still has it in for the boys who, as five-year-olds, went “wee” on the concecrated ground of the graveyard. And for the children who called her names: “When I see them burned in hell, that’s when I let bygones be bygones,” she tells Mick). The fourth character is her other grandson, the local garda Tommy (Jered McLenigan) who makes Barney Fife look like a candidate for Mensa. At one point, when Mick makes a comment about Tommy’s having seen plenty of dead bodies, the copper admits that he hasn’t. “I would like there to be dead bodies flying about everywhere, but there never is,” he says wistfully.

As in many Irish plays, there are horrifying moments tempered by humor. In this one, it’s death that loses its sting to hilarity, much of it physical. The skull batterin’ is done to music—an insipid tune on a 45 record by a female Irish popstar whom Mairtin admits to fantasizing about. And Mairtin’s other fantasies contribute to the laughs, as when he’s making two skulls kiss and one perform a sex act that we can’t describe here.

Jake Blouch as Mairtin occasionally loses his accent but never his comic timing. He brings such a wonderful childlike innocence to the character that it never occurs to you to wonder why you find this boy so adorable and funny even after he admits to cooking a live hamster in a microwave, wishing only that there had been a glass door so he actually could have seen what happened.

Stephen Novelli’s Mick is a finely nuanced character, acerbic as hell but nursing an inner turmoil that feeds the suspicion that his neighbors—particular the garda Tommy—are right about his wife’s death. Novelli hints at but doesn’t hit the audience over the head with the simmering violence inside him. Because he actually does hit someone else over the head, his guilt remains a question, but by the end you’re laughing so much it doesn’t really matter.

“A Skull in Connemara” is directed by M. Craig Getting and Kathryn MacMillan. The inventive set, which combines Mick’s home with the graveyard where he spends many minutes on stage digging into real dirt, is the work of scenic designer Dirk Durossette. And major props to the prop people on this production (Tim Martin is props designer). Every night, two plaster skeletons are smashed to smithereens and since the nearly sold-out play is extending its run through February 13, we figure that, including matinees, they’ve got more than 50 skeletons in their prop closet.

“A Skull in Connemara” is part of the Philadelphia Irish Theater Festival. Save 20 percent on tickets by ordering tickets to two or more plays at the Theatre Alliance of Greater Philadelphia website.

January 20, 2011 by Denise Foley

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