1st Irish: The Next Generation And Beyond

By Gwen Orel

They might not have boldly gone where no playwright has ever gone before, but the four writers whose plays went up last week as part of the "next generation"of Irish playwrights in the 1st Irish Theatre Festival created pieces that deftly explored the universe. One, in fact, was set in Heaven.

And one of them was my pick of the festival. For Love by Laoisa Sexton was tightly constructed, hilariously performed, strongly directed, and brought a fresh take to stories of 30-something friendship and sex.

For some reason, society tends to take such stories, which after all are the ones that everybody experiences on a daily basis, less seriously than stories about death, aging, violence.

There were plenty of those in the festival too, and some of them also hit their marks.

For Love had a refreshing courage and depth of honesty that was both funny and convincing. Sexton, along with Suzanna Geraghty who wrote the festival's Auditions, Zoe's Auditions, Part Two convinced me that she had written from knowledge, and was letting me into a world that was both stylized and real.

Sexton's use of physicality that paralleled her comic and evocative language.

And let's face it, love is just as important as war, death, old age, crime, all the things that get labelled as Very Important Issues.

There is, in the theatre world, still a bias against plays written by women with female characters at their center, dealing with the "women's issues" of love and connection.

That's at least partly because nine out of ten theatre critics are men, but it's not the only reason - there's a societal bias considers stories about women considered "niche" while a story about a man can be a "universal story."

Perhaps that is finally beginning to shift. While three of the four playwrights represented in the "next generation" were male, For Love was definitely a hot ticket, with Saturday's show oversold.

Geraghty's Auditions is already scheduled for two performances in the upcoming United Solo Theatre Festival.

Geraghty's piece about the tribulations of a wanna-be actress was much more than a sketch but a rather serious investigation, told through comedy, of, well, the meaning of life (hint: "to be or not to be" is not the question).

This is not to slight the boys. Ronan Noone's Brendan literally had me in tears at one point, and Larry Kirwan's Hard Times: An American Musical gave us a unique blend of 19th-century issues to a 21st-century beat.

Quick digression: I might have skipped For Love had not Laoisa reached out to me personally. Its title and its poster, which is a picture of a pink bra in the grass (there's a perfectly good reason for the picture, we discover in the play) don't do it justice, and it seemed like it might just be a kind of Irish Sex and the City.

I'd encourage anybody writing about love and friendship to go deeper and consider why these stories really matter, and get that into the pitch, because there is that bias to overcome that such stories aren't just sitcom froth (not that there is, really, anything wrong with sitcom froth when it's done well. I cried at an episode of The Office once).

The reason I made a point of seeing For Love, even when I learned it was sold out, is because Laoisa had reached out to me personally - there's another good lesson for playwrights there. You don't want to nag a critic, or fawn on one, but we are only human, and if you let us know it matters to you personally that we see your play, hear your CD, read your book, and remind us if we've met, we'll generally respond (email me at gwenorel@irishexaminerusa.com).

We love what we do, and it's nice when someone notices that and cares about what we do, too. Nobody gets into arts writing because she hates the arts.

Now for our reviews.

House Strictly Private, by Jimmy Kerr
Presented by Double Decker Productions, in association with The Drilling Company.

Jimmy Kerr's three-hander takes on a family in Northern Ireland dealing with the death of the elderly uncle who had supported them since John Joe McKracken, the father, died years earlier.

Told primarily through interlocking monologues, the play shows us a seemingly distracted mother and her two adult children, who gradually let us in on the uncle's impact on the family.

Kerr, whose play Ardnaglass on the Air was the hit of the 2010 1st Irish Festival, knows how to create compelling characters, and build suspense with the way he reveals exposition.

The first character we meet is Annie McCracken (Jenny Sterlin), the mum, who meets us recalling her sister Lilly, who loved to cook and never had children of her own.

When her daughter Deirdre (Jo Kinsella) first enters and talks about the food, we think it's going to be a scene, until we realize that Deirdre, too, is talking about the past.

The third person in the trio is son Sean (Paul Moon), who also remembers the significance of Aunt Lilly's breakfasts and, we realize, now lives in America.

With the use of "was" to describe a fourth child, pretty Annie with her curly hair, we gather that she, like Aunt Lilly, is dead, but we don't know how or why yet. We'll learn that it does have something to do with the uncle.

Kinsella's Deirdre, who is a nurse talking to the unseen uncle, has lively, rueful appeal. She goes from wake to wake for her patients, and enjoys them.

Sterlin's Annie is distracted but has a steel core, and Moon's Sean, though his accent flops around, has a sweet, lost quality to him.

The play bogs down a little when all three characters scold the unseen uncle for his past abuses, and there is too much backstory that at times strains credibility.

Director Laura Savia also succeeds better with the play's odd, undefined shifts in time earlier than she does when it becomes more linear.

That Sean makes fun of himself and his therapy speak for seeking "closure" with his uncle doesn't change the fact that it is, in fact, therapy speak onstage.

The reversal at the end, however, is truly satisfying, and there's something deeply Irish and deeply enjoyable about the joy, not just release, that comes from some deaths (do any other people have a jig called "I buried my wife and danced on top of her grave?").

For Love by Laoisa Sexton
Presented by Grand Scheme in association with The Drilling Company.

Laoisa Sexton's play starts with a bang, as a couple snogging stumbles onto stage.

The woman, a grunting, groaning Jo Kinsella (this woman gets laughs every time she moves her mouth), tries to get on top - only to be confronted with the sound of snores.

This is an opener only a woman would write. God, it's refreshing. There's another laugh when we see the silhouette of the man, in his skivvies, pee into the refrigerator. He will be known in the play later on as the piss-in-the-fridge guy.

In quick succession we then encounter unrelated characters: Georgina McKevit plays a woman whose husband now physically repulses her. She's hilarious as she talks to us about how much she loves shopping, and how much her husband sweats. She's not likable, but she is lovable.

Then we're in a car, with a reticent young woman (author Laoisa Sexton) being driven by a very handsome man (John Duddy, who gamely throws himself into each male role with gusto).

He's apparently a successful artist, in his BMW, and she's the bankteller he says he loves - but there's something off about it all. It ends, surprisingly, with his giving her a handjob and then sniffing his fingers.

Again. Not something a man would write.

Often plays that begin this way, with quick-moving monologues, become leaden-footed when the playwright brings the characters together and reveals their connections.

Not For Love. When we realize that Bee (Sexton), the banketeller, is best friends with Val (Kinsella), the horny, blowsy girl, and that they work for the unseen husband of Tina (McKevit), Sexton's writing doesn't let up a bit. When Tina ends up in the same BMW with Duddy, it feels less like a contrivance of the author's than a reality of the limited Dublin neighborhood they all inhabit.

Sexton's writing is hilarious. I particularly loved a scene where Val and Bee yell at each other in the phone, which looks like a fight, but is actually each telling the other how much they care.

These are not just dating stories, though. Bee, who had a child when she was only 14, is traumatized by the realization that she's soon going to be a 30-something granny. The artist who's sniffing after her is married, and that causes Val to be highly judgmental, since her own dad left her and her mum when she was a kid.

Val, who calls pay-to-talk lines to flirt with men (comically disappointed at learning the man talking to her is Polish), is a big, funny girl with a yearning for connection. And while Tina is the sharpest, least likable character, Sexton shows her as a woman who finds love in shopping because she hasn't really found it elsewhere.

Cattell's direction is broadly funny and yet also sensitive. A scene in a nightclub with people dancing to "Copacabana" had the audience hooting. And there are touches of pure poetry in Sexton's writing: when Val relates an incident involving the happy, carefree eye of a cow in a field, and how she'll never look the same way at a kebab, the effect is both silly and touching.

Some days, yes, it sounds like a good job to be a cow in a field (this field is where her bra will end up).

Kinsella's plastic face and emphatic delivery had the audience, as Val would say, "gagging for it." Seeing her in two plays back to back I was really struck by just what a comic treasure she is. TV will probably come calling, but in the meantime, the New York stage is lucky to have her.

Strong as it is, the play doesn't really end so much as just stop, and John Duddy's BMW-driving artist fades away disappointingly - but if the men (he plays all of them) are there mostly as foils for the women, after all, sauce for the goose and so forth. It probably could use one more draft. Still there was originality and life to spare here.

Sexton may be a performer (her sweet, pretty Dee is quite funny and expressive) but this is a real playwright at work, not just a vanity piece from an actor creating her own role. There should be much more to come.

Jimmy Titanic by Bernard McMullan
Presented by Tír Na Theatre in association with The Drilling Company.

Bernard McMullan's solo show, performed by Colin Hamell, the producing-artistic director of Tír Na, takes place in heaven.

Jimmy Boylan, who's known up there as Jimmy Titanic, died on the Belfast-built ship that he helped to build in 1912. The play takes on the "Titanic brand," as McMullan named it on a panel led by Cahir O'Doherty of The Irish Voice, and both mocks and celebrates that history.

Jimmy's depictions of Heaven are where the play works best. Heaven, it seems, is pretty much like earth, with mischief makers, nightclubs, and even online dating.

McMullan's creation of an effeminate angel Gabriel who robs newcomers, a cigarette-smoking God who talks like a mafioso, and the girl-appeal of being able to claim you died in a disaster, as Jimmy did, is tops.

The recreation of the disaster on the boat, however, is uneven. There are some nice scenes which show us some things about Titanic that haven't been depicted so clearly: rich men having a drink with Jimmy and his pal, as they are about to drown, leaving snobbery behind.

McMullan recreates scenes of Jimmy in the shipyard as well, and shows us what the boat and the industry meant to Belfast. But scenes apparently prompted by Jimmy in Heaven reading newspapers, of what went on in the newspaper offices as editors tried to get the news and report it, feel as if they come from another play.

The editor of the New York Times interacting with his underlings and his boss just isn't nearly so interesting as charming, cheeky Jimmy. The play meanders, and would be better if it were more focused, and shorter.

Hamell shifts between characters clearly and lightly. He's a treat. Director Carmel O'Reilly keeps the production very physical (there's a set piece, that is kind of like a steel monkey bar, that stands in for the ship and various other places).

Brendan by Ronan Noone
Presented by Fat Violet Theater in association with The Drilling Company.

Ronan Noone's play Brendan, unlike the others in the "next generation" series, has had a prior production - in a slightly different format. It won the IRNE (Independent Reviewers of New England) Award, and has been published by Dramatists Play Services.

No one told the audience on the panel with Cahir O'Doherty that he feels more content with the play with it stripped down to six actors playing multiple roles.

That was indeed a good choice, as was director David Sullivan's staging that keeps all the actors on stage watching the action, sometimes smiling at what they see, when they're not in a scene.

I wasn't that bowled over by Noone's Little Black Dress last year, set in an America that didn't feel like America. But Brendan is an Irish immigrant in an America that will never be home, one that feels both familiar and strange.

It's a play about loneliness, homesickness and love. The play, beautifully acted and directed, has the yearning beauty of an immigrant ballad.

At the beginning of the play, all of the cast, except for Dashiell Eaves, who plays Brendan, read a letter from his sister Aisling, informing Brendan in America that his mother died last week, and as she wished, he was not told until after the funeral.

For the rest of the play, Mammy, tough-talking and humorously annoying Nancy Walsh, haunts sweet, handsome, shy Brendan.

She's a proper ghost, wanting to see Brendan, banished to America to have a better life after he foolishly tried to off himself over a girl ("that two-bit hussey Judy," as Mammy describes her), and not to return.

For five years, Brendan has kept his mum's and his sister's letters in a box, not answering Mum even when she pleads with him for a reply.

He does tell some of his story in a letter to his sister, which also tells us of his time in America, finding work as a housepainter, befriending a jolly prostitute, and shyly falling for the girl downstairs.

Brendan, who plays the harmonica and loves classical music, only shows his true feelings to his dead mum, yelling at her when she nags at him about his hair, and talking back.

Through a rather overplotted tale involving sudden death of a friend, driving lessons, the citizenship test, getting a girl and losing her and getting her back again, we hold our breath waiting for Brendan to finally let someone in.

It's Rose (Chinasa Ogbuagu), the girl downstairs, who finally gets out of him that his mum died last week. When he says the words,, he doubles over to cry, and more than one woman in the house was wiping away tears as well. I would bet more than one man had a lump in his throat.

This is the climax of the play and it's very powerful. Noone has loose ends to tie up, though, and the subsequent episodes detract somewhat from the sucker-punch of this powerful depiction of grief.

Dashiell Eaves is outstanding as Brendan, has gangly appeal, with his sly smile and shy, gentle eyes. His comic timing is perfect. When Rose gives him a pair of tickets to the opera and he shouts "you could come too!" the entire audience laughed fondly.

As jolly Maria the prostitute, vulnerable friend Daisy and a bunch of other roles, Kelly McAdnrew's vitality hits the mark.

Sean Michael Bowles plays a number of roles with clarity and humor, as does Kevin Melendez, so good as Ivan in Origin's Ivan and the Dogs last year.

Ogbuagu's Rose has down-to-earth style and empathetic eyes.

Ogbuagu imbues her with heart and convinces us that she is just the girl for Brendan. As I am with For Love, I'm still thinking about Brendan, days later.

Gwen Orel runs the blog and podcast New York Irish Arts.