Having recently concluded its run of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Dramaworks turns to a moving
romantic comedy, John Patrick Shanley’s Outside Mullingar. It is a well chosen change of pace which will
be warmly greeted by Dramaworks’ audience.
On the surface, it’s a familiar formula of two
star-crossed lovers who initially don’t seem to like each other or can’t get
together because of some obstacle. All
we have to do is to find out how love finally prevails. It worked well in one of John Patrick
Shanley’s best known works, a movie, Moonstruck.
His Tony award-winning drama Doubt: A Parable was something quite different
though, about possible sexual misconduct in the Priesthood leaving the audience
in “doubt” about the resolution. An
excellent production of that play was put on by the Maltz Jupiter Theatre three
years ago, directed by none other than J. Barry Lewis, the director of Outside Mullingar.
This is a delicate but sometimes melodramatic tale of
unrequited love. And what do we have in
Ireland? Rain. Lots of it.
As well as loneliness, isolation and repressed feelings. Plus we have old family farms in the Midlands,
one owned by the Reilly’s and the other by the Muldoon’s. They are side by side, but there is frontage
between the two which old man Reilly, Tony, sold to old man Chris Muldoon almost
thirty years ago, Reilly considering it a loan and Muldoon considering it a
sale. Reilly wanted the money at the
time for a particular purpose which we later discover is an important turning
point in the play.
Muldoon promptly deeded the frontage to his daughter,
Rosemary. Why? Because she asked for it. It is where Tony’s son, Anthony, pushed her
over when she was seven and he was thirteen and she wanted the land to
ultimately hold it out, seemingly as revenge (although we later find out it is
for love). Very prescient for a young girl.
Time has come to cash in her chip.
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| Alex Wipf & Nick Hetherington |
Her father’s funeral was just held, and dreamy-eyed
Anthony invites Chris Muldoon’s widow Aoife and Rosemary over to the Reilly
home afterwards, at the objection of his father who says, “Ah you’re half woman.”
Rosemary at first does not show,
enjoying her cigarette outside in the rain. Instead there is a humorous but
sometimes confrontational discussion between Tony and Aoife about their inevitable
demise and how they will leave their farms.
Alex Wipf compellingly and comically plays Anthony's father, Tony, with a stubborn pride
in the land and of his
dominion over it. He’s a cantankerous
old man, hardly acknowledging he has not done most of the work on the farm for
years and his days are numbered with breathing difficulties. Rosemary's mother, Aoife, is played by
Patricia Kilgarriff who carries her role with a deadpan hilarity at times,
hoping her pacemaker can keep up with the conflict. She is a perfect foil for Tony.
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| Nick Hetherington & Patricia Kilgarriff |
Rosemary is in line for the Muldoon farm but Tony does
not feel Anthony is a true “Reilly,” someone who loves the farm and land as he
should. No, he thinks he takes after his
deceased wife’s family, the Kelly’s - a little daft in the head (“John Kelly
put his dog on trail for slander”). He has already thought of selling the farm
to an American cousin (a Reilly of course), hoping to leave money to Anthony so
he doesn’t feel slighted. But he needs the frontage to sell the farm. And now
Rosemary’s owns it!
But Anthony always seems to be out in the fields, either meditatively
walking or working hard. One would think
this is where he belongs. Except Anthony
has a secret, which he once revealed to his one and only past love, Fiona, long
ago. But when “I opened my heart to her
she ran like the wind.” “She ran like
fire.” What kind of a terrible secret
could it be? Might he be a morphodite
Rosemary wonders? It is yet another dramatic element that John Patrick Shanley
holds out for the end.
Although Rosemary doesn’t appear in the first scene, you
already have the sense that she is feisty, a real Irish lass; but the flip side
of her anger is romantic longings. She’s
loved Anthony all those years. Will they
ever get together?
She furiously turns upon Tony in the third
scene, castigating and shaming him to such a degree about his plan to turn over
the farm to anyone but Anthony that he finally relents. It is just one of Rosemary’s several intense
moments in the play, which Kathy McCafferty portrays with a full range of
emotions, passion, pain, humor, and prideful joy. McCafferty shines in the role.
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| Kathy McCafferty & Patricia Kilgarriff |
It is several months later and Anthony is nursing his
father in his bedroom. He is dying and
his son now knows he is inheriting the farm (not aware of Rosemary’s role in
the decision). Nick Hetherington’s Anthony has a hang-dog
look most of the time but his sullen soulfulness reveals he’s more poet than
daft. It’s a difficult role to play and Hetherington
carries it with a certain amount of humorous naiveté, often puzzled by
Rosemary’s reactions to much of what he says.
Three years pass after the death of both Tony and Aoife,
but Anthony still doesn’t seem to have a clue about Rosemary’s feelings – or be
willing to follow his own in fact. They
hardly see each other except across the frontage, until one day Rosemary spies
Tony in the rain with a metal detector, something she’s seen him with
before. She insists he come into her
house, out of the rain, and it is there that Shanley works his way towards a
fiery denouement, when the “secret,” along with a coincidence -- a “sign” so
typical in Irish mythology – are both revealed.
One could say it is a contrived ending but if you give yourself over to
the play, it is amusing and satisfying, as “the pain of love” emerges. The sun shines. We all want happy endings and this one is wrapped
in feel-good four leaf clover and delivered with the lyricism of the Irish
theatre.
As a born and bred New Yorker, Shanley didn’t want to be
thought of as an “Irish writer” but lovingly wrote this play after having
accompanied his father to the Irish Midlands on a visit, where his “Da” grew up
and still has relatives. "When I sat with my father in that farm
kitchen, the one that he had grown up in, and listened to my Irish family talk,
I recognized that this was my Atlantis, the lost and beautiful world of my
poet's heart. There was no way to write about the farm, yet I had to write
about it…I had held back much for a long time, and I kind of erupted with
language. I felt free suddenly, free to be Irish…I had turned 60, and the knife
at my throat woke me to the beauty of my own people, the fleeting opportunities
of life, the farce of caution.…” And
while poetic, thematically Shanley’s play has a hint of Sean O’Casey’s strong
women and clueless men. (Rosemary: “…men are beasts and need height to balance
the truth and goodness of women.”)
Shanley’s deep affection for his flawed but real characters
comes through in a very crisply crafted script.
It is elegant, threadbare writing with the comedic elements woven in its
romantic and dramatic undercurrent. The
director, J. Barry Lewis, seamlessly orchestrates this delicate play so it can
leap to life before our eyes.
We love Shanley’s characters too. Our hearts go out to Anthony when he hears of
his father’s plan to leave the farm to a cousin: “Don’t
criticize me, Daddy. Some of us don’t
have joy. But we do what we must. Is a man who does what he must though he
feels no pleasure less of a man than one who’s happy?....Living as I do here
with nothing but the rain and cold, and Mammy gone?....You know I’ll tell
ya. Sometimes lately I can’t breathe in
this house. You’d hold back the farm,
would ya? You stun me.”
He confesses to Rosemary that “My life is fixed down with
a rock on each corner.” She asks “by
what?” He replies: “There’s the green fields, and the animals living off them. And over that there’s us, living off the
animals. And over that there’s that
which tends to us and lives off us.
Whatever that is, it holds me here.
No. The voice I hear in the
fields wants me in the fields.” It
sums up hundreds of years of Irish misery and history. The lyricism of the language lives, and the
wonderful cast makes this seem like a slice of real life.
In spite of this being only a four person play, it is
complicated to stage as there is the passage of some four years during the play
and there are five specific locations which challenges any production company,
having to make the choice between a representational set, or frequent set
changes with darkened interruptions, or, as in the case of Dramaworks a
rotating stage. This enables the play to
maintain its pace, with well defined sets for each scene, and for a
representational depiction of the three year interval before the last scene.
Scenic and lighting design by Paul Black takes full
advantage of the Dramaworks’ stage (as well as its limitations, it being much
wider than deep, the outdoor scenes being performed down stage left and right).
The land and the sky are prominent and those are weighty themes in the play
itself. Although this is a contemporary
play, the props are straight out of the 1950s, conveying the multigenerational
nature of the farms.
Sound design by Steve Shapiro is yet another element
enhancing the art of presentation. There
are the requisite occasional barking dogs and a train in the distance. But most noticeable is the omnipresent rain,
in various pitches that add to the gloom and then with the rarely blazing sun,
a residual rain falling off the trees or from gutters. There are also the well timed claps of
thunder and lightning, or ominous rumbling thunder. And the music Shanley chooses for some of the
play’s intervals and for the background as the play closes is a beloved
Irish/Scottish song, “The Wild Mountain Thyme.” Some of the characters occasionally sing
verses from it.
And we'll all go together,
To pull wild mountain thyme,
All around the purple heather.
Will you go, lassie, go?
Costume design is by Leslye Menshouse, reflecting what these
contemporary working people of Ireland wear, and having to connote the passage
of time from the beginning of the play to the end. Costumes also have to reflect the inevitably
of inclement weather. There are several
quick changes (including one on stage).
And as this is Irish theatre there is the notable work of
dialect coach Ben Furey. The brogue
spoken here is undeniably Irish (and more reflective of the Midlands) but thankfully
clear to the audience.
But not enough praise can be heaped upon one of South
Florida’s leading directors, J. Barry Lewis, and the cast, all professional
actors from New York City, making their Dramaworks debuts. One can tell that his is a tight knit group,
“singing” Shanley’s vision of his Irish roots in perfect harmony. The last Irish play put on by Dramaworks was
The Beauty Queen of Leenane, which
was a straight forward tragedy. Outside
Mullingar although arising out of Irish sadness is a successful romantic
comedy and another high-quality achievement by Dramaworks.
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| Outside Mullingar Opening Set |
Love is never defeated, and I could add, the
history of Ireland proves it
---- Pope John Paul II
from a speech to the people of Galway, September 1979.
