Making the leap from radio to stage, Beckett’s “All That Fall” is a delight

Michael Gambon and Eileen Atkins and Mr. and Mrs. Rooney in Samuel Beckett’s All That Fall. 

All That Fall
By Samuel Beckett
59E59 Theaters, New York

Five minutes into the production of Samuel Beckett’s All That Fall now playing at 59East59 Theaters in New York, I realized with some exhilaration that I was watching one of the greatest Irish plays I have ever seen.

But All That Fall was never supposed to be seen. Beckett wrote the play for radio in 1956.
It was the celebrated British director Trevor Nunn who had the inspired idea of staging it, referencing its radio origins with actors carrying scripts onstage and speaking below overhead microphones.

The play opens with a signature of rural Ireland, the sound of barnyard animals braying and clucking.  Onstage Eileen Atkins appears as Maddy Rooney, a frail septuagenarian in a broad brimmed hat, came to meet her blind husband Dan (Michael Gambon) at the railway station.

A characteristic Beckett creation, Mrs. Rooney is a pincushion of ailments and angst whose halting progress is further hampered by the series of Irish eccentrics she meets along her way.

As painfully self-aware as the incomparable Dubliner who created her, Mrs. Rooney refers to herself at one point as “a hysterical old hag” and later notes, “I estrange them all.”

But in Beckett’s script and in Atkins’ hands, this painful self-awareness manages to be both sobering and hysterically funny.  The Irish are famous for their gallows humor, and Beckett’s is inarguably the most precise and brilliant example of the art form that the nation ever produced.

Not much actually happens in All That Fall. Mrs. Rooney has some brief discussions with the people she meets, she accepts a lift without offering thanks, she complains at length of her growing infirmities, and at last she arrives late to the station for the train that also arrives late.

But it’s on the road home that the darkness which haunts the edges of this brutally funny play falls, startling us with it its mystery and dread.

There isn’t much that separates us from the antics of the barnyard, bar the passing of time and a growing sense of futility. That could be funny or that could be terrifying, depending on how you look at it, and Beckett looks at  it both ways with his lighthouse glare. The braying and clucking animals are us, it turns out.

Onstage actor Billy Carter, most recently seen in The Weir by Conor McPherson at the Irish Rep, plays Tommy, one of Mrs. Rooney’s tormentors.

“This has been a big year for me,” he tells the Irish Voice. “I moved over and got my green card this year. I arrived here in March and met Ciaran O’Reilly and then The Weir happened. I thought it would only last for a month but it ended up going for four or five months. Then just before The Weir ended I got this.”

Carter says he has always been shy of Beckett, but when the part came up he jumped at the chance.

“When I got the offer to come over they told me I couldn’t learn my lines. It was a hot ticket in London,” he says.

“To have Eileen Atkins and Michael Gambon onstage together, the pairing of those two was just so rich. The Beckett estate is so rigorous about what goes on, so the fact that Trevor Nunn convinced them to allow us to make All That Fall a performance, even though we’re holding scripts onstage and though we perform it in a sound studio set, it really fits with that Irish setting.”

In New York the audiences have really taken to the production and the reviews have been terrific. For an actor from Ireland it’s the best kind of exposure.

“You’ll never see this production again. To hear it live and see it like this is a one off. It’s so rich in terms of story telling,” Carter says.

Toward the end of the play Beckett undercuts the brittle humor and eloquence with a dramatic development that takes the breath out of the viewer.

Gambon and Atkins joltingly remind us that the suffering Beckett is speaking of is not only abstract but concrete. You can laugh or you can cry, but you can’t hope to outrun it. As the light ebbs so too does the hope that we’ll remain untouched.

All That Fall is playing at 59East59 Street Theaters until December 8. For tickets call 212-279-4200 or visit www.59e59.org.

Peter Quinn's new book 'Dry Bones' asks hard questions

Peter Quinn's new book

It can be a murky business, living, and no one knows it better than Fintan Dunne, Peter Quinn’s incomparable Irish American detective.

In Dry Bones, the third and easily the finest part of the trilogy Quinn started with The Hour of the Cat, the author has crafted a cinematic spy tale that is crying out for the big screen (and may in fact appear there).

Set in the aftermath of World War II in a Europe overrun by the Red Army, Quinn’s gift is to tell a you-are-there tale of a disastrous Office of Strategic Services (the precursor to the CIA) mission into the heart of the Eastern front, which unexpectedly comes back to haunt him over a decade after it ends.

But first Dunne and his compatriot Dick Van Hull (who can find poetry in even the most extreme situation) volunteer for a dangerous mission behind enemy lines, with a plan to rescue a team of OSS officers who have been trying to help the Czech resistance.

Along the way Quinn, who can make history blaze to life in a paragraph, tells the fascinating story of the immediate aftermath of the Nazi nightmare, sending Dunne to the epic rally grounds drafted by Albert Speer, where eight years earlier Hitler had incited Germany to wage unprecedented slaughter.

Collapse and crisis haunt Europe and every page of Dry Bones, as do the endless pyres of the innocent dead, in a tale that begins to put quotation marks around the “greatest generation.”

As they embark on their secret mission Dunne and Van Hull uncover a shocking secret involving a Nazi doctor nicknamed the Blue Devil that changes both of their lives. But with military forces closing in their daring plan unspools, and Dunne’s participation ends with typhus and a broken ankle.

A discovery this shocking isn’t likely to stay interred of course, and 10 years later Dunne’s past catches up with him. Into his life comes the razor sharp and delightfully eccentric Turlough Bassante, with new information about the Blue Devil.

In recent years we have had many memorable illustrations of the dangers of becoming the thing we originally opposed. What we call a concern for national security, we are continually discovering, can actually just be an expression of our fear.

In Dry Bones that illustration is named Dr. Karsten Heinz, the escaped war criminal who once supervised terrifying medical experiments on helpless concentration camp victims.

Ten years later Dunne discovers that Heinz and many other former Nazi scientists and technicians are being imported by the U.S. government to help in the new fight, which this time is against communism.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend, the old adage says. But even when he’s a Nazi? Surely that’s a bridge too far?

How could the men hand picked by Hitler to torment and kill millions be awarded with highly paid new careers in America? Doesn’t that mean collusion at some level? Doesn’t that infer that you are in some way becoming the foul enemy you originally opposed?

There are hard questions asked in Dry Bones, in a tale that unfolds against the backdrop of silent witnesses to the charnel house that was the 20th century -- the men women and children who make up the countless dead.

In Quinn’s book, as in life, good men don’t always make good. Van Hull is diminished by what he witnesses, becoming a shadow of his former self when Dunne meets him 10 years later.
By 1958 things have changed for both men, but when an old crony emerges with information on Heinz’s whereabouts the tale really hits high gear.

In prose clear as cut glass Quinn shows us, with judicious restraint, just how connected the human family is, with increasingly unnerving implications. The Irish have a saying, we all live in each other’s shadow, and in Dry Bones this double-edged awareness is at the center of his tale.

Quinn takes us back into the shocking, chaotic and lethally dangerous months after World War II in Europe and shows himself to be the ideal tour guide. After the bombing of Nuremburg, with the absurdity and hubris of Nazism finally interred, real justice is still elusive and may always remain so.

In Dry Bones, this turns out to be the most shocking surprise of all. This is a provocative and immensely thoughtful thriller.

Overlook Press, $25.95

Eamon Morrisey’s “Maeve’s House” not too open

Eamon Morrissey.

Maeve’s House
Written and performed by Eamon Morrissey

The Ireland that Irish writer Maeve Brennan left behind never really left her. No one knew this better than she did. In later years in New York she referred to herself as a “traveler in residence,” a nod to the fact that although she’d journeyed far from her first home in Ranelagh, South Dublin, it had already shaped her outlook and interior life.

In 1934 Brennan’s father was appointed the Republic of Ireland’s first minister to the United States, so her family had moved to Washington, D.C. and her new life as a reluctant American began. But it is interesting that in her art as well as her life, she never quite surrendered to her adoptive country, instead remaining at a critical tangent, as though she were afraid to lose something.

In Maeve’s House, the new show written and performed by noted actor and writer Eamon Morrissey and commissioned by Ireland’s Abbey Theatre, we are re-introduced to this flinty and fastidious short story writer through a series of impressionistic biographical tales and excerpts from her works.

In a detail that in part explains his lifelong fascination with her, Morrissey coincidentally grew up in the same Dublin house as Brennan many years later and was riveted to see it meticulously described in her work. That connection encouraged him to seek her out here in the 1960s when he was starring in Brian Friel’s Philadelphia Here I Come on Broadway.

But there’s much more to Morrissey’s fascination with Brennan than that. He’s an admirer of her career as a trailblazing Irish writer in the U.S., and his one-man show is part celebration and part rescue mission, to acknowledge her achievements and to salvage her luminous work from the obscurity that threatened to engulf them.

Maeve’s House certainly reminds us how well Brennan could write. Morrissey quotes liberally from her short stories and her celebrated New Yorker columns, and in the process this most exacting of writers reemerges in all her brittle glory.

The show reminds that Brennan’s characters are most often a luckless lot. Lives are lived in domestic drudgery, grudges are nursed for a lifetime, women and men find few points of contact but multiple points of conflict, and nothing is ever what it seems on the surface.
Through it all blazes her lighthouse intelligence, but her gloomy view of life and the restrictions it places on us often make for tragic reading.

Morrissey’s one-man show really unfolds like a private reminiscence more than a play. It’s quiet, intimate and reflective, which suits its subject’s prose style but perhaps not the theater.

Morrissey tells us he met Brennan in the Russian Tea Room in Manhattan in the 1960s, having been compelled to meet her after reading her writing about his childhood home. But he came away from their meeting slightly awed, the play tells us, uncertain of who she was as a person or in the precise nature of his interest in her.

A person as elusive and accomplished as Brennan makes for a fascinating subject, but in Morrissey’s script we only catch glimpses. It’s in Brennan’s own words that the play comes to life. Her scalding portraits of lives half lived have lost none of their potency, and Maeve’s House is most effective when the words are her own.

Director Gerard Stembridge does well to keep the pace with a script that relies solely on the word and not the image, but there’s no event here, there’s no sense of urgency, there’s certainly no theatre.

Brennan was brilliant and beautiful. She crafted a celebrated career in an age when Irish women of her era were seen as incubators for the state and not much else. She did mostly it on her own and she won serious admirers for her efforts.

Wasn’t that utterly remarkable? Could a drama not be crafted out of that?

What happened to Brennan – her mental deterioration, the lonely life she lived that went on and on – is certainly worth our investment, but Maeve’s House has little enough to say on the subjects.

Instead the play turns to her writing, which for its daring and insight, ranks among the most brilliant disavowals of the conservative Catholic Republic that the nation had become, and which Brennan monitored ceaselessly from overseas (where she certainly had a better vantage point).

Brennan was a tough and pitiless writer, compassionate and kind certainly but bracingly unsentimental. Her words burnish this meditative and slow moving play, and only when they arrive does it blaze to life.

Maeve’s House is playing at Irish Arts Center in New York until November 10. For tickets and showtimes visit www.irishartscenter.org.

The birth of a nation at the Rep, “Juno and the Peacock”

Ciaran O’Reilly, J. Smith-Cameron and John Keating in Juno and the Paycock.

If you’ve never seen Juno and the Paycock, Sean O’Casey’s wonderfully well-written tragicomedy about the individual human cost of the Irish Civil War, the new production at the Irish Repertory Theatre in New York is about as perfect an introduction to the Irish classic as you could ever ask for.

The second work in O’Casey’s famous Dublin trilogy (which includes The Shadow of a Gunman and The Plough and the Stars) Juno provides a richly detailed portrait of the Irish nation emerging, if you could truthfully call it that, from the centuries-long nightmare of British colonialism.

In Juno and the Paycock O’Casey introduces us to the Boyle family, a typical Dublin working class family of the period, as they scrabble to make a living in a nation that’s turning in on itself though a brutal civil war.

Poverty, O’Casey reminds us, is a form of violence in itself, and he never loses sight of the fact despite all the conflicting forces that clamor for a hearing in the play.

In Charlotte Moore’s brilliantly paced production at the Irish Rep every type of poverty -- financial, emotional and spiritual -- is contemplated and lucidly staged.

First produced at the Abbey in Dublin in 1924, Juno is set two years earlier, when conflict over the Anglo-Irish Treaty divided the Irish Republican Army between those who supported the compromise, and those who rejected it as falling too far short of the goal of national unity.

As Juno Boyle, the hard working housewife O’Casey names after the Roman goddess of marriage, actress J. Smith-Cameron convincingly shows us the thankless job her character has to keep a roof over her family’s head as the nation wages war.

As the walls close in Smith-Cameron crisscrosses the stage in fury and indignation, at times almost threatening to take flight, in a dazzling performance that deepens most affectingly as it progresses.

Juno knows her husband Captain Jack Boyle (Ciaran O’Reilly) is a ne’er-do-well and a dreamer, but she wants to believe he’ll reform himself and be the bread winner she needs him to be, in despite of all.

That human capacity for self-deception is everywhere on display in Juno. Captain Jack has convinced himself he was once a well travelled sailor, Juno has convinced herself she can stave off the growing chaos that surrounds her family, her daughter Mary Boyle has convinced herself that her posh suitor Mr. Bentham is the man of her dreams, and son Johnny Boyle has convinced himself he won’t be held to account by the IRA for the death of the comrade he betrayed.

As Captain Jack, Irish Rep co-founder O’Reilly mines O’Casey’s tragicomic script for its pathos and humor in a bravura performance that he often delivers at his own expense. O’Reilly’s Captain Jack is an intentional buffoon, a man who knows exactly how much he can get away with and rarely strays beyond.

But O’Reilly’s Captain Jack also shows us that he expects his shortcomings to be forgiven because he’s charming, although he’s deeply unforgiving of the shortcomings of others.

Ireland’s generational poverty and the violence colonialism has done to her people are conveyed by the play’s grim tenement setting and by the maimed body of Johnny Boyle (Ed Malone), the young man who has lost his arm in a bomb blast.

O’Casey has created the social background to the play with a flair for authenticity that gives the play its epic scope (the evocative set design by James Noone is so good it deserves to be considered another character in the play, and the sound design by M. Florian Staab is first rate).

But the men in Juno are the least interesting and effective part of the world of the play, curiously enough. They do not struggle like the women do to hold their families together; they refuse to expose themselves to the deep hurts of this world if they don’t have to.

That leaves it to the women in the play (and this production) to try to chart a course through the ruination that colonialism and its consequences have made of their city and their homes.  Juno may be the god of marriage, but the Paycock she calls her husband threatens to undo everything she has built.

O’Casey’s clear-sighted assessment of the social and religious forces that will blight the lives of the emerging Republic is startlingly prescient and he puts them all on stage -- a conservative clericalism that offers more judgment than compassion; intolerant patriarchs that will quickly condemn even their own children; men and women who will sell out their neighbors and friends for a few pieces of silver. All the recognizable horrors of the first decades of the Irish Free State are already assembled as the play begins.

Moore has created a brilliant ensemble for her production. As Mrs. Tancred, the dependably brilliant Fiana Toibin gives a pitch perfect rendition of the play’s most memorable speech. John Keating has completely re-imagined the role of Joxer Daly, giving him a level of intuitive street cunning that finally underlines the plays central themes.

Ed Malone undercuts O’Casey’s melodramatic moments by investing them with an uncommon subtlety of feeling, and Terry Donnelly shines as the native Dubliner with her eye on the bottom line.

Don’t miss this production. It runs until December 8 at the Irish Rep on West 22nd Street. For tickets and showtimes visit www.irishrep.org.

Simple Minds, the other great Celtic band, play New York this week (VIDEOS)

Jim Kerr and Simple Minds

Simple Minds, who play Roseland Ballroom in New York City on Thursday night, were the greatest new wave band of the 1980s.

And they achieved that greatness before most Americans (but not all) had even heard of them thanks to "Don’t You Forget About Me" and the "Breakfast Club" movie.

To this day Simple Minds are spoken of with a hushed reverence by Irish and British fans who listened to their album "New Gold Dream" in the 1980’s and felt as if they’d found the first spiritual home of their adolescent lives.

That album was a staggering masterpiece. It arrived amid some of the darkest years of recent Irish and British history. To its listeners, raised on a diet of privation and seemingly endless recession, it arrived like a new romantic neutron bomb that exploded with yearning and majesty and romance and glittering dreams.

It was so singular and so indescribably transcendent, and there hasn’t been a moment to match in pop music since its debut.

U2 wanted to write "New Gold Dream." They reportedly handed it to their producers on "The Unforgettable Fire," Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, and said this is what we want. Even the cover looked like a tribute by the Irish to the Scottish band. But Simple Minds didn’t need to strive for grandeur, they simply had it, right from the start.

Now, after ten years without a U.S. tour date, they’ve finally come back to set America on fire with the same lightening that they managed to bottle from their earliest days.

“It’s too long; it’s an embarrassment,” Jim Kerr tells me, referring to the long absence, “but we’re here now and in that absence I am very confident the band has got better. People might even see benefit of the absence.”

The shorter tour schedule is a testing of the water Kerr admits. “But already we’re only a week in and there’s talk of coming back next year for a much more extensive tour which we hoped for but we weren’t taking anything for granted.”

What can we expect to hear when they take the stage?

“We have been trying to get together a good mix, for instance Europe in the last two years we played only the rare stuff, those albums before we broke. It was amazing to go back and play that stuff and we thought that would be a one off, but we found songs in there that we thought, 'Wait a minute. These things can fit into what we’re doing now.' Some of them were 30 years old, but they felt like they’d come from the future not from the past.”

This is true. For example this year for the first time I listened to "Room," a song from their early catalog on "Empires And Dance," and was amazed by how contemporary it sounds.

But with majestic albums like "Sons and Fascination," "Sister Feeling Call" and "New Gold Dream" Simple Minds found  a way to express the inner life of the Celt better than any other band of that era, including U2.

“I’m delighted to hear you say that and the first thing I would say is that I agree with you,” says Kerr. “There’s something going on that way and above the melody and the beat and all that stuff. There’s a certain spirit to it and a certain joy to it and an openness to it that I think, that’s our roots. There’s a certain imagination. People say where did all that come from, I’m not sure but I just think it’s part of the DNA.”

This music made the Irish and the British love them long before they cracked the American market.

“We had five albums out elsewhere before we even got a domestic well-promoted release here,” explains Kerr. “Just then when it was time for us to go out and make it we got this earthquake of an event, this "Breakfast Club" song ("Don’t You Forget About Me") that wasn’t meant to do what it did.” (Thinking back he laughs uproariously.)

The stadium era days that quickly followed were a double-edged sword for a band that previously had walked an effortless tightrope between sweeping emotion and the pensive inner life.

“On the one hand don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Whereas our success had been hard-earned the "Breakfast Club" seemed separate from us and because of that there was a distortion.”

Kerr admits the band didn’t make it any easier on themselves because after breaking through they followed "Once Upon A Time" with songs like "Belfast Child" and "Mandela Day."

“The radio programmers said who the f—k is this? Whereas that stuff did well everywhere else it was a damp squib here in the States. We don’t have the same career in America that we have elsewhere but I’m very anxious not to blame anyone, it’s just the way it was.”

When people ask Kerr about Simple Minds he often asks which Simple Minds? “Is it the early new wave thing, is it the electro avant garde, is it the stadium rock years, is the MTV years, is it the Celtic "Belfast Child" thing? The expanse within the music has been huge. That’s thank to the guys who could make it their own and always make it Simple Minds.”

Are they any bands now that excite him the way "New Gold Dream" and other albums of his excited an entire generation?

“That’s a good question. There’s bands I can like on a level of that’s great pop or that’s great song writing or something. But not in the way that you’re talking. I am struggling to come with any currently. I still listen to The Doors and don’t forget he was a Celt as well.”

“On Friday I listened to "Astral Weeks" by Van Morrison and that for me probably does all the things that you just mentioned there. It’s got this sense of wandering in it. It has stream of consciousness lyrics where I don’t know what he’s talking about but I do know what he’s talking about. And it touches me in a way that the other stuff doesn’t touch me.

I want to pin him down on the source of his band’s magic, but he thinks it a hallmark of being a Celt.

“There’s something inside us reaching for something, searching for something, connecting to something that’s intrinsic to where we come from.”

I have to admit it’s a thrill to hear the man who made the album that has haunted and obsessed me for 30 years contemplate his own achievement. "I didn’t do it," he maintains, "the whole band did."

“We hope we’re one of the bands of our generation and if we are that’s great. We don’t think anyone owes us anything really.”
  
Simple Minds play the Roseland Ballroom on Thursday, October 24. For tickets CLICK HERE.

After ‘Doctor Who’ and ‘Broadchurch’ Arthur Darvill conquers Broadway

Arthur Darvill starring in "Once"

Arthur Darvill is currently making his New York stage debut in "Once, the Musical" on Broadway, but he needs no introduction to avid fans of British television here in the U.S.

In "Doctor Who" and more recently "Broadchurch," Darvill has become a household name to the growing U.S. fanbase of these two very different but acclaimed British shows.

But in a step away from the roles that have won him fame right now Darvill’s playing a lovelorn Irish musician in the Enda Walsh-penned musical "Once" based on the film of the same name.

‘I've been doing it for about six months now and I'm here till Christmas,’ Darvill tells IrishCentral. ‘It's one of the longest runs I've done. There's always that wariness about something that's really long commitment wise but actually it's been brilliant and the time's flying by.’

The ensemble production reflects the closeness of the troupe of actors onstage, Darvill says.

‘It's like a real family. I've never taken over from a role before, and I thought oh God they'll be so stuck in their grooves, but they were so welcoming and generous as performers and people.’

But playing a down-on-his-luck Irish singer seems like such a sideways step character wise - what made him interested in the role?

‘I'm a musician as well as an actor,’ Darvill explains. ‘Once is one of those stories that are bizarrely universal because it's not necessarily a love story, it's a story about personal growth and getting over yourself in order to be happy. I think it's very realistic . The meeting of these two people made me think of people you meet not even necessarily romantically - who change your life in a profound way and they don't even know it. People who have that influence over your life. I think it's a really beautiful non-patronizing story.’

It's a Broadway musical without being a razzledazzle Broadway musical, Darvill says. ‘The music really appeals to me and I love Enda Walsh's writing anyway. This is different to his work but the fact that he did the writing for this was interesting to me too.’

He did have some stipulations. Being British, he knew he’d have to go to Ireland to work on his Irish accent.

‘I said there's no way I can do this without going back to Dublin. Me and my girlfriend went the weekend before I came over here. My best mate is from Ireland and we just did a play together. His name is Cian Barry. He's proper Irish. He just told me everywhere I needed to go. He just gave me a list of pubs and we did that. We went to Howth and did the walk and it was really great to see it with my girlfriend. I hadn't been for three years and I'm planning to go back when I get to the UK because I just love it there.’

Meanwhile the success of "Broadchurch" (in which he plays Reverend Paul Coates) took Britain and the U.S, by surprise, but Darvill says he knew it would be a hit for an unusual reason.

‘It's an ensemble piece and I take no credit for it whatsoever. I'm so proud of it and I was really lucky to be involved with it. The writer Chris Chibnall is amazing and he's the reason I got on board with it in the first place.’

There was one aspect in particular about "Broadchurch’s" production that encouraged him to sign on, he says.

‘Early on I knew it was going to be good because Chris said to me there's going to be a no t--ts policy. Everyone has to be nice and good. That really filtered through the production.’

The success of "Broadchurch" should be send a message to the studios he says.

‘It's a real testament to the writer being allowed to write. Chris was very much left alone by producers. I think that shines through. I think when people trust the writer on television then good things get made.’

Darvill has heard the rumors of a U.S. production again starring David Tennant and himself but his own casting has not quite been confirmed yet.

‘I think that's amazing. I don't know how that's going to work but it obviously is because he (Tennant) is doing it. I think the fact that Chris is involved is good.’

Fans of "Doctor Who" have often written that they’d have liked to see the Doctor (played by Matt Smith) take Rory William’s (Darvill’s character on the show) on board the Tardis as a companion in his own right. Playing the pair as a bickering gay couple has been a feature of entire forest acres of fan fiction, does Darvill realize that?

‘Maybe,’ he laughs. ‘We're not far off that anyway. We (Smith and Darvill) really lucked out with each other. We'd done a play a few years before together and we really got on. It was always our plan to play brothers. We'd always get together and get drunk and say we should really play brothers. Then "Doctor Who" came up and it couldn't have been a better thing. I respect him so much as an actor and a friend. With my first day on "Doctor Who" with Matt it was clear he knew exactly what he was was doing.’

One of Rory’s finest hours was as the Roman Centurion who waits 2000 years to be reunited with his true love Amy Pond. It’s one of the most romantic tales ever told on "Doctor Who," or indeed anywhere. Darvill says he still hears all about it.

‘So many people have said to me you know that that character has ruined the expectations girls have of their boyfriends now for everyone. I said yes I know. It's also difficult for me to live up to anything close to that. Thanks (showrunner) Steven Moffat.’

And a final world on "Once, The Musical?"

‘It's a proper play with music and it has real heart. Be prepared to turn up and bawl your eyes out in a good way. It's unlike anything anyone has seen on Broadway.’

The truth of Michael Fassbender's "12 Years A Slave" is brutal (VIDEO)

Benedict Cumberbatch and Chiwetel Ejiofor in 12 Years a Slave.

In 12 Years a Slave, which opens on Friday, gifted actor Chiwetel Ejiofor stars as Solomon Northup, a New York State citizen who is kidnapped and forced to work as a slave on a plantation in New Orleans in the 1830s.

At the start of the film Northup, who is a talented musician, is deprived of his liberty and separated from his adoring wife and family. For 12 harrowing years he is forced to live like a barn animal, under the watchful eye of cruel slave owners like Edwin Epps (magnificently played by Michael Fassbender) who would have no hesitation to hang or shoot him without a second thought.

What makes the film so hard hitting is that it is based on a true story. Northup was a real man and the film is closely based on his famous account of his life as a captured slave in Louisiana. That the events in this film actually happened gives it an extra dimension of authenticity.

12 Years a Slave is a real life horror film, in other words. The white columned plantation that Northup works on quickly begins to resemble a Nazi-era concentration camp with guard towers and terrified inmates.

Here the axe can fall at any moment for something as simple as looking at a slave owner the wrong way. No one is ever safe.
Because of these facts a sense of an all enveloping dread haunts almost every scene of the film, first because we realize that Northup is being hoodwinked by smooth talking white gentlemen who are in fact leading him to his doom, and then because of the actual horror of finding himself in leg irons being transported to a slave plantation.

Because he has always lived as a free man, Northup’s terror at what is happening to him is shared by the modern audience’s terror that these things actually happened.

On the slave boat to the plantation Northup is coached by the other slaves about how to behave. Don’t look white men in the eye too directly, don’t offer a smart word, don’t question any order and you might just live, he’s told.

When he reaches the plantation we watch as Northup desperately tries to stay alive in a system that has been crafted to work him into the ground. He is sustained only by the thought of escape and being reunited with his beloved family, but any hope of help from others who discover he has been kidnapped are quickly dashed because it turns out that even principled white people are as intimidated by the system of slavery as the black people who live under it.

Northup is literate and intellectual and he can write, three facts that he is told would get him killed if they were discovered. He cannot seem too smart and he cannot be too subservient either. Trying to outpace the suspicions of the white people who exploit him is the only way he will survive.

Fassbender’s character in particular is fascinated by the thought of breaking Northup, who he realizes poses a threat to his established order by being too competent and too smart.

Northup is slave owner Epps’ property, he reminds us, to be owned, used and abused as Epps sees fit. “That’s scripture,” spits Epps, quoting the Bible, which actually says a slave should do as his master bids. “There is no sin,” in mistreating a slave Epps thunders, since a slave is property and a man may do what he likes with his property.

But British director Steve McQueen never allows Fassbender to become a mad-eyed slave owner menacing his noble slaves. Instead the film pulls back from big sweeping emotions to show us how damaging the slavery system is to literally everyone who lives under it, including the slave owners themselves.

In 12 Years A Slave white people are shown rationalizing the exploitation they’re practicing; black people are shown rationalizing the exploitation they’re experiencing. It’s a complicated, poisonous dance.

So what McQueen has accomplished is finer than just a meticulously crafted reenactment of a true story about slavery. The film actually shows us the damage that slavery did to both slave and master. That is ultimately what makes it so hard hitting.

Ejiofor’s performance is Oscar worthy, as is Fassbender’s in his supporting role as Epps.  Ejiofor’s delivers not just the best male lead performance of the year, it’s one of the greatest ever committed to film. If you only see one film this year, make it this one.


Here's the trailer for "12 Years A Slave":

Irish arts events light up New York’s October

Irish actor, writer and director Tim Ruddy joins a heavily Irish
cast in Thomas Kilroy’s version of The Seagull this week.

Stoked Fest, an exciting new one-day film festival for kids brought to you by the people behind the long running Craic Irish Film Festival, is scheduled for October19 at the Long Beach Hotel on Long Island.

If you live on the island you don’t need to be told about the sucker punch that Hurricane Sandy delivered to the locals. Certainly Stoked Fest organizer Terence Mulligan doesn’t need to be told, since his own home like a thousand others was damaged in the unprecedented floods.

Mulligan says his new festival is planned as part of the ongoing revitalization of Long Beach in the aftermath of the hurricane. To that end Stoked Fest wisely puts the spotlight on the island’s youngest inhabitants.

But this is a real film festival, which means a bit of Hollywood style pizzazz will be included to create the right atmosphere. That means you may want to get your youngest family members gussied up, because there will be a red carpet to walk when the kids enter the hotel.

The night is scheduled to start at 5 p.m. with kids walking the red carpet in front of the paparazzi. Polaroid pictures will be taken of your nearest and dearest on the carpet. (They can pick up the pictures after the short screenings). You may have to contend with some limelight hugging divas trying to outdo each other, but you expected that.

“We wanted to make this inaugural festival fun and interactive for the kids and families,” Mulligan told the Irish Voice.

“Expect to see specially selected shorts and recent award-winners such as Granny O’Grimm and the Boy in the Bubble together with some recent Oscar nominated shorts such as Pentecost.”

Presented by Jet Blue, which will be raffling two round trip tickets on its airline, Stoked Fest will keep the spotlight on Irish short films. “Long Beach needed a kids festival, and there are a lot of Irish and Irish Americans in the Long Beach and Rockaway area,” added Mulligan. “It makes sense the first year to do a spotlight on Irish short films that are kid friendly.”

Free Zico water and munchies for the kids and families will be provided. Doors open at 5 p.m. Tickets are $10 for adults and $5 kids. Kids under five attend free. For more information and detailed shorts films contact 917-373-6735 or visit www.stokedfest.com.

The Seagull was playwright Anton Chekov’s breakthrough drama, the first of his four great masterworks, and this week beginning on Thursday, October 10 at the Culture Project a 1981 translation by Irish playwright Thomas Kilroy will tread the boards.

Featuring a cast that includes some stellar Irish talent including Stella Feehily, Ryan David O’Byrne, Amanda Quaid, Tim Ruddy and Kenneth Ryan, Kilroy’s East Galway set version unfolds in a classic Anglo Irish setting instead of Russia, and it reappraises the classic play through an Irish lens and through the medium of Hiberno Irish.

Kilroy sets his version of Chekov’s masterpiece in 1886 Ireland, in the era of the Land League amid the inexorable decline of the Anglo-Irish estates. By doing so he unearths glaring parallels in the tectonic shifts in Russian and Irish society that comment on Chekhov’s original in unexpectedly telling ways.

Tackling a classic play and its universal themes while at the same time uncovering entirely new and unexpected social and political angles that illuminate the Irish struggle is why Kilroy’s version matters and why it is still frequently performed.

It will be interesting to see such a large company of distinguished Irish actors on the same stage as they tackle this challenging material and filter it through their own experience as Irish citizens. It also reminds us that many of the best Irish actors now call New York home rather than Dublin.

Kilroy is himself one of Ireland’s most distinguished playwrights of the 20th century, with 13 stage plays to his credit which include The Death and Resurrection of Mr. Roche and The Shape of Metal (which was performed at 59 East 59 Street Theatre as part of the 1st Irish Theatre Festival).

The Seagull will perform at the Culture Project’s Lynn Redgrave Theater, 45 Bleecker Street at Lafayette in New York. Call 866-811-4111.

A look at books: from crime and supernatural, to US politics and Irish fiction

Books by Nethercott, Matthews, Ellis and Maher. 

The Séance Society
By Michael Nethercott

IT’S 1956 in Connecticut, and private investigator Lee Plunkett has enlisted the help of the man known universally as Mr. O’Nelligan to help him with an apparently unsolvable crime with a supernatural element.

Mr. O’Nelligan is old, ancient even, but the scholarly Irishman has maintained his keen eye and his talent for timely aphorisms. Now the unlikely duo is thrown together in an engaging and well-plotted romp filled with eccentric and witty characters that will keep you guessing to the final page.

Author Michael Nethercott’s maternal grandparents hailed from Co. Kerry, as does his Irish immigrant detective Mr. O’Nelligan, who finds echoes of the poetry of W.B. Yeats in even the most depraved criminal circumstances. This is a book for a cold night by a warm fire and a surefire antidote to the winter blahs.

Minotaur, $24.99.


Tip and the Gipper (When Politics Worked)
By Chris Matthews

YOU might not remember, but there once was a time when America’s political opponents worked together for the good of the country. In this era of stalemate and manufactured crisis, MSNBC anchor and author Chris Matthews has found himself reflexively looking back at earlier times when the job of shaping the nation’s future was more important than serving the party’s needs.

Unlike nowadays, when one party seems incapable of conceding to the other even after the people have spoken, when Ronald Reagan arrived with a historic mandate. House Speaker Tip O’Neill realized it spoke for itself.

But O’Neill also knew it was his job to defend government programs, Social Security and welfare, and to prevent unlimited tax giveaways to people who did not need them if the country could not afford them.

Each side, Reagan’s and O’Neill’s, won victories and suffered defeats, but through it all they kept working in an example apparently lost on many of their ideological heirs.

Matthews wants the country to remember the example of leaders who worked to advance the nation’s interests rather than attack their own people to consolidate their political power.

Simon & Schuster, $29.95.


The Boy at the Gate
By Danny Ellis

SHOULD we mourn the passing of Dublin in the rare auld times? It depends on who you ask.
It’s often said you can judge a nation by how it treats its most needy citizens, and by that exacting yardstick 20th century Ireland was often neck in neck with Romania under the USSR.

Ellis grew up in 1950s Dublin, where he was eventually abandoned by his own mother and sent to the already notorious Artane Industrial School for orphaned and abandoned boys. There were hundreds of children in each year -- the school actually looked like a town full of forgotten boys -- but Ireland’s secret shame was hidden far away from sight.

It was run by the order that has become a byword for abuse and psychological terrorism, the often laughably named Christian Brothers. Against this backdrop of dysfunction and bullying, the timid eight-year-old Ellis has to cobble together his own identity, a task made all the more poignant by his innocence, his hope and his fear of the abusive adults all around him.

Music saved him. At Artane Ellis discovered a talent as a trombonist that would lead him away from his wrong beginnings.

But even 50 years later the ghosts of that era still sometimes haunt the adult man. The Boy at the Gate is a testament to the fragile hopes of his boyhood self and the near fatal frontal assault that theocratic Ireland delivered them.

Arcade, $24.95.

The Fields
By Kevin Maher

Some  books are filled with the immanence of an Irish summer morning, and Kevin Maher’s debut novel The Fields is the latest example. In it we meet irrepressible 14-year-old narrator Jim Finnegan coming of age in the 1980s in Dublin.

Love, even unrequited love, has the power to save your life is the book’s always timely message, and very quickly we watch as Jim falls head over heels for Saidhbh, the young woman four years his senior.

The music of 1984 and the period detailing are seamless, as is the growing sense of the complications that stand in Jim’s path as he tries to grow up in a country where there seems to be no future ahead of him.

The dark underside of Irish life in this era is also instantly recognizable to anyone who lived though the period. In The Fields Maher has marked himself out as one of the most distinctive and inventive new Irish voices in fiction in recent years.

Little Brown, $26.

The torture of a married woman, 'A Lady Is Waiting' by Anto Nolan

Fiana Toibin stars in A Lady Is Waiting, part of the 1st Irish Theatre Festival.

Betrayal. It’s older than the Greeks.  Its constant traveling companion, the desire for revenge, can burn so hot in some natures that it overrides all of their good sense with predictably disastrous results.

The Irish, just like the Greeks, know all about long cycles of betrayal and revenge, since we’ve been riding that hobbyhorse for centuries one way or another.

In Dublin playwright Anto Nolan’s quietly seething drama A Lady Is Waiting, we’re introduced to a woman still grappling with the unspeakable cost of marital betrayal and the near homicidal desire for revenge it has created inside her.

But instead of the usual Greek theatrics, Nolan calls his scalded betrayal victim Doris, giving her a name that’s as modest as her inner nature. Doris the doormat, Doris the door mouse.

It takes a little longer to understand that Doris is also potentially deadly.

As Doris, the Irish actress Fiana Toibin is an ideal mixture of reflexive modesty and bubbling fury, at one moment a salt of the earth Dubliner and the next a terrifying half demented whirlwind of recriminations almost threatening to take flight.

This makes watching A Lady Is Waiting a bit like looking at a double negative. One moment Doris is engaging and charismatic, the next you’re wondering if she can be trusted with sharp utensils.

Over the hour or so of it’s run time, the one act A Lady Is Waiting presents a slow burn and convincing portrait of a life coming unglued, with all the horror and fascination that goes with it.

“You look so wound up,” people tell Doris. “They never ask who’s doing the winding,” she eventually replies, and it’s this stark awareness that drives the play.

What happens to people who have suffered a great wrong? Especially when it becomes clear that they’ve been unmoored by the shock of it.

Can you blame them for reacting the way they have? Does your sympathy have an expiration date?

What’s remarkable about Doris is how ordinary she is. A typical if reluctant housewife of the Celtic Tiger era, she has the battle scars that instantly endear her to 10,000 women exactly like her.

But something has happened to Doris that isn’t found in the general playbook of Ireland; certainly it isn’t often discussed. When Doris arrives early to a conference in Galway she can smell her husband’s very unique cologne in the room, even though he isn’t there.

Onstage as Doris Tobin looks stricken, as though trap door after trap door keep opening beneath her. Could it be that her husband is having an affair with one of these ladies, she wonders. The trail of cologne certainly leads to that conclusion.

Until she meets a young man called Karl, that is, and identifies him as the source of the unmistakable fragrance. Then she sees her husband greet him, unaware of her presence nearby. That clinches it.

This has actually happened, more than once, to Irish women, but it’s the first time I’ve seen such a thing happen in an Irish play.

As though aware herself of the groundbreaking character of what’s happening to her, Doris is dumbstruck by what she has witnessed. There are no rules for this, she realizes, and quickly after she realizes there are no words for it either, at least not right away.

Nolan often gives characters marginalized by Irish drama a chance to have their say. In the beginning of his career he was particularly good at presenting urban male disaffection on stage, but over time he has crafted increasingly complex portraits of recognizable modern Irish women, with a deepening historical awareness of the choices that have been (and have not been) available to them.

In A Lady Is Waiting the passions that an Irish woman is still not allowed to express are responsible for her ultimate undoing. That part of the play is particularly hard hitting. There is nothing decorous about Doris’ fury, it’s raw and heartfelt. Nolan (and Toibin in performance) lay it all out there for the audience to judge.

In a heartbreaking twist it’s Doris’ own eldest son that has her committed, after a tantrum leads to an accidental fire that almost destroys her family home.

The men in her life, all the men in her life, have demonstrated that their love is conditional on her good behavior. They will leave her alone and literally imprisoned until they decide she’s learned her lesson.

A Lady Is Waiting concludes its run at the Cell Theatre, 338 West 23rd Street, on Sunday, September 29. For information visit www.thecelltheatre.org.

Review: Conor Creedon’s deceptively straightforward “The Cure”

Irish actor Michael Mellamphy gives a tour de force performance in Conal Creedon's The Cure.

The Cure 
By Conal Creedon
1st Irish Theatre Show

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the more insightful and accomplished a new Irish play is, the less chance it has of being produced on Broadway.

The major American critics love Ireland. The picturesque Ireland of early 20th century Irish drama, that is.

The truth is they usually don’t know very much about contemporary Ireland, nor do they welcome the complicated challenge it presents to their old certainties. They certainly don’t know much about its contemporary playwrights.

I don’t know why Conal Creedon hasn’t been produced on Broadway yet. Certainly his plays are as deserving as any recent work from Ireland that has made that cut. In fact, he has more to say, more concisely, than just about any of his dramatic contemporaries.

That thought struck me watching the gifted actor Michael Mellamphy’s performance in Creedon’s deceptively straightforward one act drama The Cure this week, which is being presented as part of the exciting 1st Irish Theatre festival.

On the surface The Cure is a charged monologue about a luckless man drinking his seasonal bonus pay on a three day bender in the lead up to Christmas.

But as the play progresses it becomes an absorbingly rich meditation on generational poverty, colonial exploitation, masculinity, sexual repression and the reflexive Irish cure-all, booze.

Creedon, the play reminds us, knows Cork intimately, from the unique aromas of each street to the important nuances of the Hiberno-English spoken on them. I can’t think of another writer who can conjure the city so vividly.

As our narrator (Mellamphy) winds his way through the city streets in search of the cure for his hangover (more booze) he encounters the old Christian brother who terrified him as a child, giving rise to questions about what happened to him and who he’s become.

Mellamphy inhabits his character so completely that he gives an electrifying performance. He also plays the characters that the narrator encounters, magically transforming himself to present a snapshot of the community.

It’s amazing how much Creedon actually packs into this rueful tale without harming its central premise. Although The Cure is most concerned with the ways class and history and oppression conspire to blight the lives of the innocent, he also manages to explore how the generations tangle with each other over ever diminishing expectations and opportunities.

Learned helplessness is one of the notable characteristics of a postcolonial society and it is everywhere in The Cure. Generations of Irish men see life as an increasingly meager speculation, the play reminds us, without ever understanding the bigger picture or their place in it. Instead they’re just left to flail and scramble on their own as history keeps on passing them by.

But Creedon knows there’s another story that could be told and he gently steers his narrator toward it, toward the bigger cure than the one that can be found in pubs. It’s a welcome reminder that a new generation of Irish playwrights are writing about modern Ireland free of the imprisoning traditions so beloved American theatre critics.

This production, nimbly directed by Tim Ruddy, deserves to be seen by a wide audience.

The Cure is playing at Ryan’s Daughter, 350 East 85th Street, New York. Visit www.1stirish.org for tickets and showtimes.

Goldfrapp's new album Tales of Us and Beacon show reviewed

Goldfrapp's new album

One week ago today I saw Goldfrapp in concert at the Beacon Theater in Manhattan. I'm still not over it.

Their new album Tales of Us was released the day before they took the stage in New York City, so I was still responding to its lofty majesty as the lights went down.

Having loved this band more than any other for a decade now it was the first time I had the good fortune to see them live in concert.

Disclaimer: for a decade I have considered Goldfrapp to be the most consistently accomplished electronic music duo in the world - and that I was seeing them for the first time as they introduced us to their most remarkable album to date was a quite lot to process.

With albums as rich - and frequently sublime - as Black Cherry, Seventh Tree, Head First and now Tales of Us, they're the only logical successors to the heady years of dramatic 1980's synth pop.

But in many ways I think they have surpassed their new wave predecessors. I don't say that lightly. Alison Goldfrapp's sensual vocal styling’s and the genuinely poetic structure and frames of reference heard in Goldfrapp's tracks have put them at the front rank of creative pop artists, in the Bowie, Bolan, Bush, Sylvian and Roxy Music pantheon.

Goldfrapp can make music that can transport you, sweep you up on your subway commute, restore you to yourself, gladden your soul, restore your faith in life and literally bring tears to your eyes, often in the same song.

Simultaneously inside and marvelously outside the times, their sound and their mission statement appears to be to completely entrance. It's rare to find an artist that can stop you in your tracks, but to find one whose voice and music can literally pull you outside of time?

That's your first clue. We're not talking about a pop act here; we're talking about poets. They deserve to be as seriously considered. Read Cavafy or listen to a Goldfrapp song, it can feel like the same thing.

Appearing with a 20 piece string ensemble, the Worldless Music Orchestra, in the particularly perfect venue of the Beacon, I didn't anticipate what a sonic wave of otherworldly perfection would explode from that stage. It dazzled my eyes and delighted my ears. Syth cross pollenated with strings to achieve a timeless balance of sound and feeling.

Looking at the audience before the show began was instructive. I saw hordes of the most impeccably curated men and women, straight and gay, I have ever seen in one venue in this city. For a decade I have loved this band like a monk in his hermitage, when I finally had a chance to see what the rest of us looked like it did not disappoint. The crowd was also multiracial and of all ages, which was delightful to see, and they looked as enslaved by Alison Goldfrapp as I am myself.

I know nothing about this singer, really. All I know is that I deeply respond to her music and she's been a constant in my life since before 9/11.  That means she was a beacon through all the chaos and madness of the Bush years. I'll never stop wanting to listen to her voice for that reason. I could never adequately thank her.

If Marlene Dietrich wrote and sang in a synth pop band then you'd have an idea of what Alison Goldfrapp looks like onstage. She picked the perfect outfit to play the Beacon, a retro Golden Age of Hollywood affair,  that also complemented the tone and content of the new album.

Jo, the first track on Tales of Us (all but one are named after a person) and the show's opening number is the perfect curtain raiser (the band played nine tracks from the new album). Jo brings you into the bewitching world of Goldfrapp, where vocals warm as a caress can tell the dark tail of a serial killer in a way that is utterly captivating.

Not many musicians have the artistic courage to present material this difficult at the start of a new album or concert, fewer have the skill to make you want to press repeat the moment it ends. But Goldfrapp aren't just a band, fans know they're a way of being alive in the world. Critics who don't understand that really don't know how to approach them.

In one sense I find it embarrassing to review Tales of Us without giving away too much about myself. Because that's the thing about Goldfrapp, they make music that's so intimate and strange that it ends up mapping a deeply personal experience for each listener.

Onstage the duo was note perfect, even a little isolated from the audience in their clear attention to detail. It was a measure of the respect they have for their music and their fans that they didn't compromise a moment of the event.

Live I heard new textures in the songs from the new album, such as in the showstopper Clay, a song about two soldiers in love that brought ovations, but so did track after track. Drew, the first single released from the album, is a haunting, sensual meditation on desire, life, death and the search for transcendence.

I suspect the wisest choice will be to allow the lyrics and subjects of Tales of Us to emerge over time, the way I have always done with this incomparable band, because the sound is also the sense.

If you haven't heard of the band, or if you haven't caught up with them lately, this is your lucky day. Entering the world of Goldfrapp takes a little patience and skill, because it asks more of you than most artists know or care how to anymore.

If you do enter their world though, prepare to have your life immeasurably enriched.

Buy the album here or here

Find their latest tour dates here

Watch Drew below.

Review: The Brendan Behan we’ll never really know

Adrian Dunbar stars as the doomed Irish playwright Brendan Behan in Brendan at the Chelsea.

Irish playwright Brendan Behan lived his life like it was a form of protest, because it often actually was. Born to a working class family in Dublin, his life could very easily have been as difficult and circumscribed as the one his father had led save for one saving factor that changed everything -- his genius.

Because he came from far outside the leafy south Dublin suburbs, where becoming a writer was a much less revolutionary act, Behan was initially overlooked. He made good use of his own obscurity, turning it into a permission slip to flout every social code in the theocratic rulebook of the joyless Catholic gulag that Ireland was when he reached maturity.

In Brendan at the Chelsea, the new play from Belfast’s Lyric Theatre about his life in New York now playing at the Acorn Theatre in Manhattan, Behan’s playwright niece Janet has teamed up with the formidable Irish actor Adrian Dunbar to present a play filled with glimpses of the frenetic energy and anarchism of Behan in his prime.

He was a bit of a walking hurricane, Brendan. Things were never more dangerous than when the brief periods of calm descended.

Brendan at the Chelsea wisely focuses on the qualities that made him a star, including his keen awareness of how much of an affront he offered to the Irish establishment and a sense of sheer mischievous play that hadn’t been seen on the Irish stage in generations.

But it also focuses on the qualities that would undo him, which were often linked as it turned out.

As Behan, Dunbar is a little too physically imposing to convey the mercurial, puckish Irish writer entirely convincingly.  Behan was a trickster and a charmer, capable of great kindness and equally capable of devilment calculated to wound.

But Dunbar makes for a much more somber stage presence, bringing out Behan’s struggles but undercutting his roguish qualities.

Throughout Brendan at the Chelsea unfolds like a memory play, with diverting detours into farce and heightened naturalism along the way. That means that tonally it makes unexpected and lively twists, such as echoing the riotous comedy of Behan’s play The Hostage when it brings two unabashedly queeny gay men onstage to dance the Madison, and for Behan to pursue, for example.

But when moments like this happen they throw up interesting questions. Acknowledging Behan’s bisexuality (or homosexuality) isn't quite the same thing as addressing it.

What did it mean to his work? How did it change how he thought of himself? What did his long-suffering wife Beatrice think about it?

The answer is that we don’t really know because the play leaves all of that rich material offstage. Insofar as it’s addressed at all it’s usually for comedy, or to confirm that it was an issue for the playwright. The biographical details are presented, but the analysis less so.

This is tantalizing stuff, though. To be gay or bisexual in the fifties in Ireland offered a completely destabilizing challenge to the dominant culture that was much bigger than the issue of gayness itself. Issues of class, class discrimination, militant republicanism, Behan’s bone deep anti-clericalism -- where was all that?

There’s no question that Behan possessed enough demons to keep an exorcist in business for decades, but the play skims the surface of what the people closest to him actually mean to him. Only his wife Beatrice, played by Pauline Hutton, really gets close.

But she’s left to recite a laundry list of domestic slights without ever really scratching the surface of whatever it was that brought them together in the first place. Maybe that’s the truth of what happened between them, but it would have served the play to crack that nut and see what it contained.

Brendan at the Chelsea has a lot to say about the cruelty of addiction and the self-defeating way in which Behan rationalized it.  One scene with his friend George, played by the excellent Richard Orr, provides the most accomplished and telling scene in the play.

George informs Brendan that a new school of thought suggests alcoholism is actually a disease, and not only an affliction, and that perhaps he could benefit by tackling it head on.

Behan dismisses his theory almost as soon as it’s offered of course. That’s because the people that stand to benefit most from therapy are usually the first to deny its effectiveness.

Brendan at the Chelsea puts Behan on the couch, sometimes quite literally, but it gets sidetracked by his charm, the way that people once did, and it allows his witty quips to protect him from urgent challenges he faced.

At the end of the play the audience is left wishing they could have known him better, a fate that the whole of Ireland once shared.

Brendan at the Chelsea is playing at the Acorn Theatre on Theatre Row, 410 West 42nd Street. For tickets call 212-239-6200.

A new take on Tennessee Williams’ “A Glass Menagerie”

Cherry Jones and Celia Keenan Bolger star as mother and daughter in "The Glass Menagerie."

If you already know Tennessee Williams’ iconic play The Glass Menagerie (now in previews on Broadway) then you’ll know that poor Laura Wingfield is probably destined to halt her way to eternity.

The truth is the play has been produced so often, with so many different interpretations, that it’s remarkable its lost none of its power to move. That’s probably because Williams seemed to have opened a vein to find the ink.

For some reason The Glass Menagerie itself defies satire, even though the storyline has been fertile soil for satirists for decades. It’s probably because the language is too rich, the pain it describes is too raw and too enduring.

For an actress, appearing in one of Williams’ plays still represents a career high. That’s why Celia Keenan Bolger, already a Broadway luminary at 35, signed on to play hapless Laura after first mulling it over carefully as any smart actress should.

Concerned that the production could go either way, tilting into a lifeless Masterpiece Theatre presentation or worse, delving into the realms of camp, Keenan Bolger was reassured when she saw who she’d be playing opposite -- none other than the Broadway legend Cherry Jones and screen idol Zachary Quinto, who’s best known for his performance as Spock in the new Star Trek movies.

“I grew up in Detroit, Michigan and I’m Irish on both sides,” Keenan Bolger tells the Irish Voice. “My dad’s family was from Co. Wexford and my mom’s came from Co. Fermanagh. It’s so funny because there’s a section in The Glass Menagerie where someone’s girlfriend is thought undesirable because she’s Irish and I always think, but I have that in me as well.”

Keenan Bolger’s reputation was made starring front and center of some of the most celebrated musicals and plays of the past decade, including The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, Les Miserables, Peter and the Starcatcher and The Light in the Piazza. She’s played a headline Irish role too in a production that won plaudits.

“I got to play Mary Boyle in the musical Juno, based on Juno and the Paycock,” Keenan Bolger says. “That was a really fun experience, with an Irish director (Garry Hynes) that made it truly authentic. As an actor I’m looking for roles that are very different from who I am, which The Glass Menagerie is.”

In Williams plays people, particularly women, are put into very difficult and unfair circumstances by society, by men usually. The opportunity to explore that made her interested in the role.

 “Amanda Wingfield (played by Jones) is known as this flighty southern belle who’s obsessed by the past. But in the version we’re doing Cherry has so much more backbone,” Keenan Bolger says.

“This woman has supported a family in the Great Depression as she figures out how these two kids who don’t have any prospects are going to exist in the world once she’s gone. It’s why the play still resonates now.”

Keenan Bolger says the production attempts to highlight what happens to a family when times are so rough.
“In our version all of the characters are trying to take of each other but they just don’t have the tools to do it. Everybody is constantly disappointing everyone else. My character can never rise to the expectations her mother has for her,” she says.

It’s not hard for anyone to access the kind of discomfort the characters onstage are experiencing. Feeling like you’re a disappointment to your parents is at one time or another a pretty universal experience.

Onstage Quinto is never more expressive than when he’s barely emoting at all. Think of his portrait of Spock in the Star Trek films, where he’s even surpassed Leonard Nimoy in his ability to capture the conflict between his human and Vulcan sides.

“This is one of the most gifted group of actors I have ever been on stage with. With Zach I wondered if his film work would transfer onto the stage, and of course he’s a master,” Keenan Bolger says.

“He’s a true artist who can exist in any medium and I think he’s crafted a definitive performance of this character. He was born to play this part.”

Keenan Bolger reveals her greatest challenge going into this production was to find the truth of her character.

“My director John Tiffany (whose recent credits include the Tony winning Once, The Musical) told us that we would make the production we wanted to make. People may or may not like it but we can say that we made the production that we wanted to make. In rehearsal it felt like we were making a new play. It just turned out that people loved it!”

The Glass Menagerie is playing in previews at the Booth Theatre, 222 West 45th Street from September 5. For tickets visit Telecharge.com or call 212-239-6200.

A look at books: Irish weather history, Elvis as God and letters of J.F. Powers

Ireland’s Arctic Siege: The Big Freeze of 1947

By Kevin C. Kearns

EXACTLY 100 years after the darkest year of the Great Hunger, another freakish phenomenon arrived to torment and kill the Irish poor. In January of 1947, just three years after the end of World War II, a bizarre anticyclonic weather event occurred and went on for two months.

Freezing temperatures, biting east winds, five major blizzards and snowdrifts of up to 20 feet all arrived during the worst fuel crisis in the nation’s history. It was as if a ripple of the tide of misery and human suffering of the Famine had reached the shore after 100 years.

There were other factors that still give pause. On the morning of Sunday, January 26, 1947, at exactly 10:27 a.m., people in their homes in Dublin felt a strange, quivering sensation. According to the seismograph at Rathfarnam Castle outside Dublin it was the result of a fairly large earthquake that lasted sporadically until noon.

By 1:30 p.m. that same day it began to snow in Dublin. At first the city looked like a Christmas card scene. Children raced around throwing snowballs and making slides.

Two days later it had become a winter beyond human memory. Inexplicable to meteorologists, it seemed to some of them as if the wrath of God had been directed against Ireland.

Throughout the country people were forced to strip the furniture in their own homes for fuel. By February 1947 Dublin’s death rate more than doubled as the old and the poor succumbed to hunger, cold and illness.

In his evocative and often startling book, Kevin Kearns holds the mirror up to the Irish government, which under the circumstances did the unthinkable -- nothing at all. They sat in Government Buildings round warm fires and waited.

There was no immediate national effort to aid the towns and villages lost in the snow. One hundred years after a callous government had left Ireland to its fate, a new one had done likewise.

Dufour, $20.54.

The River and Enoch O’Reilly

By Peter Murphy

IF you don’t believe in God, Elvis Presley can make a handy substitute. For generations of Irish prodigal sons that’s exactly what he has been, after all. If there’s no man in the sky to untangle all your complicated emotions then the man from Memphis will do just as well.

In Irish journalist and novelist Peter Murphy’s hypnotic second novel The River and Enoch O’Reilly, we meet the ex-seminarian and now preacher who prays to Elvis.

Murphy’s episodic and fractured tale introduces us to the locals of Murn, the fabled little Irish town filled with haunted inhabitants where bodies have been turning up in the nearby Rua River.

That set up provides the scaffolding to reflect on the nature of love, faith, family and fate, which could hardly be more Irish subjects. Murphy’s book often achieves the supernatural clarity of a lucid dream, which is a testament to the skill of his emerging talent.

Mariner, $14.95.

Suitable Accommodation: The Letters of J.F. Powers

Edited by Katherine Powers

SOME Irish men have terrible tempers that prevent others from ever really getting to know them all their lives. Hair trigger susceptibility to real or imagined slights can see them caught up in an isolating dance that goes on almost all of their lives.

Two decades after his death, Irish American writer J.F. Powers deserves to be more widely known. But that was true even during his life, when his hyper vigilant character often scared people away.

The writer of two novels and three collections of short stories, his output may have been modest but it attracted serious praise. Evelyn Waugh thought him gifted, as did other literary titans Saul Bellow and Phillip Roth.

It was Powers’ own nature to spend his life in search of what he called “suitable accommodations” that really marked him. Brought up in poverty and destined to spend his life in its grip, Powers lamented his circumstances much more often than he struggled to overcome them.

The letters contained in this collection provide vivid snapshots of Powers’ often chaotic life, lived often on the edge of near destitution. They also show how engaged he was at all times with his own creativity, although the tension between that and his modest life is definitional.

These letters paint a portrait of a life (and a love affair) begun in earnest but unraveled by an enraged sense of the gulf between how things were and how things should be. They are also undone by Powers shocking lack of practicality.

But behind all that, they are marvelously written, and so we -- like the editor herself -- are left to parcel out the man from his achievements. This is a poignant but strangely salutary collection.

FSG, $35.

“Brendan at Chelsea” showcases a gifted human Behan

Adrian Dunbar as Brendan Behan

Brendan at the Chelsea, a new play about the brilliant but self-destructive Irish genius Brendan Behan (written by his niece Janet Behan) will make its New York debut next month fresh from its successful run at the new Lyric Theatre in Belfast.

The production tells the story of Behan’s short but eventful residency at New York's legendary Hotel Chelsea in 1963. Then as now New York was a town that indulged and celebrated rebels, and Behan quickly found himself face to face with the temptations and hard questions he had tried to outrun at home in Ireland.

His alcoholism, his sex addiction and his rumored bisexuality all played their parts in his life and art and New York City brought them into clear focus, providing him with opportunities for exploration and self-discovery that were almost non-existent to him at home.

Like Oscar Wilde, another profligate Irish genius that he adored, Behan was becoming the spendthrift of his own genius. At times it seemed like he would prefer to do almost anything other than write, and in the play we see him the way those closest to him often did -- dead drunk, flat broke and way past the promised delivery date of his latest book.

At the Chelsea his famous neighbors included Arthur Miller, Bob Dylan and other generation-defining artists. Behan certainly deserved his place among them.

At his best he represented the generosity, humor, compassion and brilliance of the Irish people, and his life and work was a towering rebuke to the insular theocratic republic he despised.

But he was decades ahead of his time. Like Wilde, we had to learn to become his contemporaries.
Deciding to make a virtue of a necessity, during his Chelsea stay Behan had proposed and was engaged to write a travelogue he titled Brendan Behan’s New York. The new play makes note of the fact but is set entirely within his hotel suite. As his play conquers Broadway his personal life is coming apart.

It’s hard to watch someone so prodigiously gifted turn his eloquence and dramatic flare into blistering attacks on the people who love him best, but this production, directed by and starring the gifted Adrian Dunbar (best known for My Left Foot and The Crying Game) aims to rescue Behan from the sometimes reductive theatrical portraits we have seen before.

Alcoholism is still a taboo subject in Ireland, and so truthful assessments of the wrenching tragedy that was Behan’s final act have often focused on what was lost to art more than the damage that he did to himself and his loved ones.

Brendan at the Chelsea doesn’t flinch in the face of his dissolution, however. It was needless, it was cruel, and it ended disastrously, the way so many helpless addicts lives do.

Behan wanted to live a life that mattered, so much so that his appetite for achievement could completely overwhelm him. He didn’t want to be an ordinary man, making ordinary observations and living an ordinary life. As he said himself, with characteristic whimsy, he did everything in his power to resist becoming “just an ordinary human Behan.”

But it must have taken a lot of courage to come from his humble Dublin childhood and find himself celebrated on the world’s stage. It didn’t usually happen to writers from his background, so there was no road map, no one knew how to handle him, and he was the rarest of rare birds.

Behan had grown up in a militantly Republican house steeped in the myths, poems, literature and ballads of old Ireland, and that must have given him his first introduction to the power of the written word.

Janet Behan is to be thanked for writing this immensely thoughtful and subtle play. Dunbar is known for tackling tough nut characters, but Behan may be the biggest challenge of his career and his work already has the critics raving.

In Brendan at the Chelsea he reintroduces us to the playwright, poet, novelist and wit whose funeral was the biggest seen in Ireland since the time of Michael Collins. All Dublin loved him, and he lived and died like he didn’t know.

The show will run in a five-week engagement at the Acorn Theatre, 410 West 42nd Street, from Wednesday, September 4 through Sunday, October 6.  For tickets call 212-239-6200.