'Stop the Tempo' in New York - Romania’s failure through an Irish lens

Olivia Horton, Reuben Barsky, and Sarah Silk in Stop the Tempo

If anyone knows about the irreversible process of cultural colonialism it’s the Irish. That’s why Ireland’s most iconoclastic young Irish theater director Matt Torney is a perfect fit to direct Stop the Tempo, a ferocious new work about displacement and drifting written by Romanian-born playwright Gianina Carbunariu.

After the fall of communism in 1989 Romania -- until that point a second tier communist state in the grip of the ruthless dictator Nicolae Ceausescu -- saw itself transformed overnight, becoming a sort of free market Petri dish suddenly brimming with corporations, easy cash, chain stores and chattering media personalities.

For Carbunariu, 36, and for her generation Romania became completely unrecognizable. Born and raised in a failed state, she suddenly had to find her way in a flashy new landscape of mindless consumerism and rampant consumer culture.

Generations of the Irish have seen Ireland mapped and remapped in endless colonial and cultural expansions that have often led to a similar kind of displacement and fury, and so the play and the author are an ideal fit for Origin Theatre Company, the innovative company with a mission to produce new European works and the producers of the annual 1st Irish Theatre Festival.

There are many kinds of theft, but to see your culture and your history purloined in exchange for a bag of shiny baubles (a colonial rite of passage from Romania to Ireland to Manhattan) is particularly searing and results in the most enraged piece of playwriting I have seen this year.

Carbunariu isn’t claiming that life in the old communist Romania was better, but she’s full of contempt for what has come to replace it – a society that apparently knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. A nation numbed by the endless cycle of aspiration and fantasy that’s fed to it from its flickering TV screens. A soulless place, a massive supermarket.

Torney chose Arlene’s Grocery in the trendy Lower East Side to stage the show (which has just closed, but will open again later in the year). It’s an inspired choice for a production and three characters that flit from club to club in search of contact highs or self-escape.

Under Torney’s meticulous direction, actors Olivia Horton, Reuben Barsky and Sarah Silk have formed a perfectly coiled unit to present Carbunariu’s challenging play. In fact they function with more precision and mutual support than I have seen on a New York stage in years.

That awareness of and insistence on interdependency is a European theater commonplace, but it’s unusual to see in a New York production where it becomes as political as it is artistic.

Carbunariu’s work is, it must be said, quite self-consciously radical at times, trading a little too much on its desire to provoke or shock. There’s something more than a little adolescent about its punk rock nihilism and its thoughtless joy in anarchy.

But God knows there’s no doubting its anguish. Behind all its theatrics, its alienation and its last stands is something that disarms you -- its sincerity.

Romania once had citizens, and now it has consumers, the playwright informs us. To make his point about how the new capitalistic Romania over-stimulates and hoodwinks consumers with a non-stop barrage of products and services they’re told they’ll almost die without, Torney has crafted a shifting mercurial production that flouts complacency.

The three characters in the play, adrift in their personal lives until they find each other, protest their disillusionment with a series of public pranks that quickly escalate into out and out terrorism. But it’s a measure of their inability to affect positive change that they become consumed by their protest whilst forgetting its message.

There’s a special poignancy in being part of a transitional generation, as Carbunariu, who cannot return to the Romania she grew up in or find peace in the gaudy new nation she lives in now, well knows.

Stop the Tempo laments this fact and is set in the no-mans-land between the two nations. The play offers no solutions because, as Carbunariu points out, it’s already too late for them.

Things are as they are now. You make your peace with them or you’re fated to drift, haunting your own life, since you’re literally neither here nor there.

By Cahir O'Doherty, Irish Voice Arts Editor

Review: Learning to live with the past - “That’s That” by Colin Broderick

History, just like geography, has a way of always getting in front of you. It can help shape your perspectives, your character and even your accent long before you get wise to the fact.

In Northern Ireland this is especially true. If ever there was a place where history keeps playing out on a loop tape over and over, it’s there.

So the most challenging thing you can do, in a place that’s reflexively repressive, is try to write your own story or step outside the one you’ve been handed at birth. Mold breakers more often find it’s themselves who are being broken there.

Like a lot of young people growing up in the North in the 1980s, writer Colin Broderick found the imprisoning claims of his community (and his family) increasingly suffocating. Their expectations were laid out early and it was made clear there would be no exceptions. The game had been rigged before he was even aware he was a participant.

In his new memoir 'That’s That' (Random House), a reference to the phrase his mother used constantly to discourage his teenage self from asking increasingly awkward questions, Broderick paints a portrait of a community in crisis.

What’s interesting is that the people he writes about in 'That’s That' try to live as though they’re not in crisis. They may be poor, they may be surrounded by trigger happy police and soldiers, they may be tied to a wider conflict they didn’t start and can’t end -- but they have immense pride and they live, or try to live, as if none of it is happening.

It was happening though, and it was increasingly inescapable. In fact in 'That’s That' the demands of history are actually so consequential that Broderick actually opens the book by meditating on the history that created the conflict in Ireland in the first place.

It’s not such a grandiose move. To Irish people The Troubles and their legacy are as familiar as their national flag, but to most people born outside of the island it can look like an atavistic bloodbath with no real purpose and no end. We see a centuries old facedown between Gael and Planter, but the world sees pasty white people killing other pasty white people, and they just scratch their heads.

To make sense of his present Broderick mines his past. There are so many telling episodes from his childhood and adolescence to choose from in 'That’s That' it’s a wonder how he survived at all.

The first stirrings of desire are accompanied by bone deep religious panic and mortifying shame. Childhood innocence is discarded too soon, as though it didn’t matter, and throughout it all there’s the ever mounting pressure of his own spirit pressing back against the straight jacket his society wants to put him in.

When you grow up in a place that is making it increasingly clear it has no place for you, when you’re surrounded by choices that aren’t really choices at all, there’s only two things you can do. You can accept your lot and wrap your community around you like a blanket, or you can turn tail and run away as fast as you can.

Wisely, Broderick chose to run. But as 'Orangutan,' his first memoir made clear, it was no easy task.
In the North they often talk about the peace process, but they rarely ever talk about the peace you have to make with your own past. 'That's That' makes a point of it. The political cost of the conflict is visible to all, but its emotional cost has hardly appeared in print until now.

In fact Broderick’s reactionary tailspin lasted almost two decades until he finally surfaced and found his new life. To dull the pain and to outrun the demons he did what generations of the Irish did before him -- he kept moving, and when that didn’t work he turned to drink, the Irish anti-depressant.

'That’s That' is Broderick’s apotheosis. It’s the hard won testament he brought back from his broken past. 

It turned out that it was love and not war that shaped him, but it can take half a lifetime to figure that out if the world you grew up in was daily rocked by bombs and barbarism.

In 'That’s That' Broderick does something that takes remarkable courage, he tells the truth. It’s the ultimate revolutionary act.

It isn’t his parent’s truth or his community’s truth. It’s his own, and it’s unassailable.

New York Irish Craic Fest is back for benefit night - Film festival brings Mundy, Julie Feeny and more

Julie Feeney

For a decade and a half now New York has had it’s own Irish film festival in the Craic Fest. Alongside introducing Irish and Irish American audiences here to the latest films from Ireland (frequently introduced the director and stars) it’s also been a successful showcase for emerging and established Irish rock acts like Mundy and harder to classify singers like Julie Feeney.

On June 5 the unmissable summer bash that is the Craic Fest’s benefit night will unfold between 6 and 9 p.m. at the upscale (and Irish run) beer garden at Tuttles on 735 Second Avenue.

“We got a lot of feedback about our previous rooftop parties which have been pretty wild and fun,” Craic festival director Terence Mulligan told the Irish Voice.

“We have been known for some rock and roll events but our audiences is changing over time. We get more young Irish professionals coming now so we wanted to move this year’s venue to Tuttles. It really caters to the crowd that we have been developing with our film, music and comedy events.”

To support the arts is always a worthy cause, and this year’s ticket buys you an open bar featuring appetizers and beer and spirits from Tullamore Dew and Budweiser. Performance wise, Jimmy Lopez will play on the congos and DJ Joe Balance will spin on the decks. If that sounds like a chill summer evening, well, it is.

“It’ll be a festive atmosphere,” explains Mulligan, a Brooklyn native who knows from festivals. “For the 30 bucks you’re getting a sweetheart deal and supporting the work we do year round.”

Surprise guests at the annual bash have included Cillian Murphy, Aidan Quinn, Liam Neeson and other Hollywood heavyweights.

“Our events have always been about the people who come to the Craic events. It’s never been about celebrities, although it’s always fun no matter who turns up. We’ve been running this festival successfully for 15 years and we know how to throw events by now,” Mulligan says.

To give you some idea of how comprehensive the Craic Fest actually is in its portrayal and reflection of modern Ireland, next up on the festival annual list of keynote events is the Craic’s now annual LGBT summer festival held at the Irish Arts Center in New York.

“We have become a venue to show the works of new Irish gay and lesbian filmmakers. We have partnered with the GAZE Dublin International Film Festival to present the most accomplished films from the festival,” explains Mulligan.

In September the Wee Craic Fest, a one night blitz of music, comedy and film will be followed by the Craic Comedy Fest in November (which has hosted headline Irish comedians like Des Bishop and internationally beloved Father Ted alum Ardal O’Hanlon.

What marks the Craic Fest out is its longevity (there isn’t another signature Irish arts event to touch it) and the fact that it’s uniquely embedded in the Irish American scene here, with a devoted and in-the-know audience, that’s unlike any other festival of its kind in the city.

“Our sponsors like Tullamore and Budweiser have really helped to keep the festival running from year to year,” Mulligan reveals.

Another shot in the arm to the Craic Fest’s ongoing relevance is Mulligan’s ambitious plan for the festival’s future, involving a Craic Fest summer festival with the much bigger scope of the much-missed Guinness Fleadh.

“We already have the network to make a major Irish fleadh a reality, since we have built up the relationships and have the proven success to date to make it work,” says Mulligan.

“If a major player sees the potential and wants to underwrite it we can certainly make it happen. Like I said, we have the talent and the contacts. We have been doing this for over 15 years and we know the Irish community here better than anyone. So this could well be the next logical step for us.

“In the meantime we have the benefit night on June 5 at Tuttles and we’re featuring a lineup of talent to make it interesting. And the open bar to make it fun.”

For tickets to the Craic Fest night at Tuttles, visit www.thecraicfest.com.

Silent night in the country - Conor McPherson’s “The Weir” at the Irish Rep

John Keating, Sean Gormley, Billy Carter, Dan Butler and Tessa Klein in 'The Weir.'

Ireland wrong foots you. Its signposts lead in the wrong directions, its timetables are always notional, and its loquacious inhabitants actually tell you little about themselves.

To be Irish is to navigate contradictions. We’re Irish but we speak English, we’re European but we live on an island, we’re insular but we’re globetrotters, we’re individually retiring but collectively we’ll raise your roof.

We’re here, we’re ambiguous, get used to it.

The Irish, said Yeats, have a preference for a swift current. But that doesn’t imply an effective one.
In Ireland high speed Internet works most of the time, but not all of the time, and diverse locations produce diverse results. You’ll just have to get used to the unpredictability.

If you can’t get used to the unpredictability you’re not ready for Ireland. Other more prosaic cultures can find us exhausting.

Blow-ins notice the contradictions much more than the locals. The ring forts next to the ring roads and Cairns next to the Spars and the ruined castles that are becoming hotels often hypnotize them.
Ancient time and the 21st century exist side by side there like few places on earth. If you can live with the contradictions without blinking you’re on your way to becoming a local.

In Conor McPherson’s most accomplished play 'The Weir,' now playing at the Irish Repertory Theatre in New York, the writer examines the persistence of the supernatural in the burgeoning Celtic Tiger era, which is represented by Finbar (Sean Gormley) the local boy with the going concerns who has already bought up half his own village.

McPherson sets his play in a sterile world of lonely bachelors who break up the monotony and isolation of their daily lives by meeting up for a jar at their local far out in the country. Their nights are spent in teasing and rivalry and sometimes in blistering recriminations. But there’s clearly a rhythm to it they find reassuring, which is why they keep coming back.

Their world is shaken up by the arrival one evening of an attractive young woman named Valerie
(Tessa Klein). Introduced to the single lads by the married Finbar, who may be hoping to become more than just her tour guide, she’s a source of unexpected delight, and sometimes of resentment, that throws their evening off its usual groove.

Valerie, we learn, has come down from Dublin to rent old Maura Neelon’s place, a house that was built on a fairy road. What this means, I suppose, is that the real world has come into conflict with the psychic one, and when that happens hauntings can result.

Thanks to Valerie’s curiosity about her new home the lads tell her the story of the fairy road, which leads to a night of each of them telling ghost stories, describing real events that happened that they could not explain but have not forgotten. 

As the evening goes on Jack (Dan Butler) emerges as the most fully drawn character. His rage as an older man recalls his callousness as a youth, when he missed the greatest romantic chance of his life out of sheer obstinacy. Butler gives us a much more antic performance that the signature one given by Jim Norton in the play’s original cast.

Jack is clearly in search of absolution, and it emerges that in her own way Valerie is too, and the author makes what happens to them as unsettling as the consequences. McPherson’s play takes increasingly disturbing turns as it amps up the terror that his characters experience.

In fact, the tales become increasingly distressing until Valerie, long silent, unexpectedly tells the most shocking one of all.

In tone and content, these tales – some of them are horrible – strain at edges of the play’s bucolic setting and introduce a shocking level of menace and upset, both for the characters and the audience.
Watching the play now, 16 years after its debut, it’s become common in some circles to hear it described as a classic.

It certainly qualifies as a meticulously observed and crafted tale, but the ghost stories told in The Weir are so distressing that they strain at the confines of the play. In fact, each character unloads so much growing psychic terror that the low-key conclusion, when it eventually arrives, looks a little unconvincing.

McPherson skillfully nudges us toward an encounter with the unseen world, but then he over eggs the horror. Not every ghost story need make your knees knock.

But the supernatural in 'The Weir' is experienced as increasingly hostile -- even the stillness and silence of the country is presented as a growing threat.

Taken individually, each ghost story delivers a riveting tale. But what it all amounts to is, even for the Irish, is just a little too ambiguous by the play’s end.

(The Weir is playing at the Irish Repertory Theatre until July 7. For tickets and showtimes visit www.irishrep.org).

Review by Irish Voice Arts Editor Cahir O'Doherty

In twilight years and refusing to go quietly - 'These Halcyon Days' at The Irish Arts Center - VIDEO

Anita Reeves and Stephen Brennan star in These Halcyon Days

It seems that the most vital voices in Irish playwriting currently belong to women. For proof stop by the Irish Arts Center in New York this weekend and catch 'These Halcyon Days' by Deirdre Kinahan.

A lovely, understated marvel about life and loss and finding the courage to keep on going, it features pitch perfect performances by the two leads, Anita Reeves and Stephen Brennan.

Set in a nursing home (Kinahan’s dramatic instinct takes her to places other writers avoid), we meet the elderly Sean, who has essentially been abandoned by his loved ones, dropped off and completely forgotten. Into his life bursts Patricia, a fiercely funny woman of a certain age who quickly becomes his friend and confidant.

It startles me to say this, but there’s more humanity and smarts in one scene of Kinahan’s new play than I’ve witnessed in the last 10 years of contemporary playwriting by Irish men. I don’t know why this is.

All I know for certain is that within the first 10 minutes of 'These Halcyon Days' I could tell with certainty that I was in the presence of gifted theater makers with a clear passion for their craft and its undeniable power to move you.

As Patricia, Reeves serves up a gale of scalding sarcasm that’s a mask to hide the heart of a lion lurking underneath. Her character wins us over from the first time she rolls her eyes at the mortifying conditions of the nursing home she’s been reluctantly delivered to.

Reeves let’s us see a woman in full, conveying Patricia’s spirit and courage, as well as her anger and disbelief at the circumstances she finds herself in.

But crucially she also shows us her completely intact sense of humor and the real tenderness that’s awoken by her brief flirtation with the handsome man in the wheelchair who quickly becomes her confidant.

As Sean, Brennan seems to be entirely composed of charm and a degree of gentleness that would beguile anyone. You can see why Patricia’s smitten with him from their first meeting. That awareness also makes the heartlessness and cruelty of his abandonment ring true, particularly in an island where institutional neglect or abuse achieved the level of an epidemic.

Sean, it turns out, has been a celebrated actor all his life, but now his West End triumphs and his cinema work are all behind him. Now he subsists on his memories of happier times as he struggles and increasingly fails to stop an imprisoning fear of the future, with its almost certain unhappy end, paralyzing him further.

There’s so much depth to the scenario that Kinahan has created that this play could easily stretch far beyond its 70 or so minutes. As it is she focuses on the biggest questions of all, the fate of love and the darkness that haunts the edges of all our lives. She’s unflinching in her gaze.

David Horan’s direction is economical and uncluttered. Like the playwright, he allows the richly detailed characterizations to carry the play. A scene where Patricia and Sean have an impromptu waltz as he remembers the “Shall We Dance?” number from 'The King and I' is worth the ticket price alone.

We haven’t had a playwright with this much faith in character as the basis for a story for quite a number of years. That’s what makes the performances of the two leads so particularly powerful.

What underscores Kinahan’s achievement in 'These Halcyon Days' is that it springs authentically from Irish life. By being so particular it becomes universal. But there’s a special joy in seeing carefully crafted characterizations on the Irish stage after years of near pantomime levels of misanthropy or snark.

There is a scene where the blossoming friendship between Patricia and (she has yet to discover the discreetly gay) Sean gives her back all the hope and possibility that life can still offer. In that moment you can clearly see the face of an expectant young girl emerge on the experienced woman’s face.

It’s because 'These Halcyon Days' has found the most ideal actors it could possibly have asked for that the play contains completely unforgettable moments like these. Go and see it and be moved by a perfect production of a funny and unsettling play.

For tickets and showtimes visit www.irishartscenter.org.

A look at books: Ireland’s growing cadre of first rate thrillers and personal essays of home

The Last Girl

By Jane Casey

Ireland's growing cadre of first rate thriller writers is already a thing to marvel at, and Jane Casey is emerging as one of its most accomplished members. In 'The Last Girl' her nervy young detective Maeve Kerrigan sets out on her third (about to be bestselling) case, and this time it’s a murder at a well to do home.
The house happens to belong to defense attorney Phillip Kennford, a man who isn’t particularly beloved by the police for his tendency to get convicted criminals off the hook.

Casey excels at creating plot complications when you least expect them, and her characters continually throw up hooks and snares that you can’t see coming. She’s a born thriller writer.

Money can buy you a mansion with a pool and a wardrobe to stock a Paris fashion show 'The Last Girl' demonstrates, but it can’t buy you love or second chances, which are what Casey’s characters are often in search of. It turns out that money can’t protect Kennford’s wife and daughter from the killer that stalks them in their own home either.

In 'The Last Girl' Casey, who works as an editor and is married to a criminal barrister, once again demonstrates her talent at crafting a compelling tale and brings insider insights into the business of crime and punishment.

Minotaur, $24.99

The Devil In Her Way

By Bill Loehfelm

Maureen Coughlin, the 29-year-old Irish American cocktail waitress who was the star of the bestselling The Devil She Knows, has moved from Staten Island to New Orleans where she is fresh out of the police academy. But the post-Katrina city is still devastated by the hurricane, and this adds immeasurably to the threatening atmosphere of this increasingly tense thriller.

Writer Bill Loehfelm excels at crafting gritty characters and the mean streets they move in, and fans of his previous effort will be delighted to see his tough as nails Irish heroine come into her own in this twisty, well drawn and delightfully complicated yarn.

This is the New Orleans that the tourists never get to see, seen through the eyes of a woman who has waited tables for years (which places her in the company of saints already, frankly).

Coughlin’s authentically realized Irish background and the familiar ideas she was raised with add atmosphere and authenticity to this increasingly tense tale.

Crichton, $26

Extended Family

Edited by James Silas Rogers
The New Hibernia Review, an important academic journal of Irish studies produced by the Center for Irish Studies at the University of Saint Thomas, has traditionally opened each new issue with a personal essay.

Many of these works are luminous meditations on Irish life, heritage and experience, presented in plainly argued language which is always a relief to the casual reader.

Now for the first time the essays have been collected in a selection that represents the best submissions, and it turns out they’ll be of interest to anyone who cares about Ireland, its history and its people.

Irish America has many subsections, containing orthodox, reformed and progressive wings. That this is finally coming to light is a testament to the role that Irish studies is playing in American life, rescuing us all from clichés and stereotypes and uncovering the richly layered reality of our lives here.

'Extended Family' succeeds as well as it does by offering personal as well as political readings of contemporary Irish American experience. It makes times to make connections and it carves out space for poetry too, which connects us in deeper ways to our points of origin.

Most of all it highlights the enduring importance of story, the tales we tell ourselves and the tales we tell about ourselves.

Dufour, $18.95

Graveland

By Alan Glynn

Irish thriller writers who can rope in world famous actors like Robert De Niro and Bradley Cooper to star in the film version of their bestselling thrillers are becoming a dime a dozen.

The Irish gift of storytelling is in no danger at all, apparently. Alan Glynn’s last bestselling thriller 'The Dark Fields' was turned into the hit Limitless, starring the aforementioned actors and making a name for the accomplished writer.

In Glynn’s hotly anticipated latest, 'Graveland,' a Wall Street investor is shot dead while jogging in Central Park. Then a few hours later a hedge-fund manager is gunned down outside a swank restaurant. Are the killings related?

That question sets off investigative journalist Ellen Dorsey, and her suspicions are confirmed when a CEO is killed next.

Soon we’re following her into the corrupt and dangerous world of shadowy financial deals and the Occupy Wall Street generation that oppose them. Fasten your seat belts.

Picador, $16

There’s something about Mary - controversial play 'The Testament of Mary' wins Tony nod before closing early

Author Colm Toibin at home in his Dublin study

 
Irish writer Colm Toibin received the news that his controversial play The Testament of Mary, which tells the story of Jesus’ mother in her old age, was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Play last Tuesday morning.

But an hour later he learned the news that poor ticket sales meant the show would close earlier than planned, after only 43 performances on Sunday, May 5.

Toibin, an award-winning writer whose critically acclaimed novel Brooklyn, about a young Irish emigrant’s arrival and transformation here, is scheduled to be filmed starring Rooney Mara, was philosophical.

Broadway is a tough nut to crack, he told The New York Times. Only 25 percent of the plays that debut there ever turn a profit. Knowing that simple fact made the bad news easier to accept and didn’t take the shine of the play’s nomination.

Mentioning he heard the news about the closure directly from the play’s producer Scott Rudin, Toibin reflected on the production’s successes.

“About 30,000 people will have seen the play over a six-week run by the time it closes, with a standing ovation every night,” Toibin told the Times.

“In European terms, that’s a huge success. In Dublin I’d be walking around with everyone saying, ‘What an amazing success you’ve had with your play.’

“But in New York the template is another of Scott’s shows, The Book of Mormon, where you’d have three productions touring the world and never ending. We won’t do that. The play will have productions in Spain, Brazil, Denmark, and some other countries we’re talking to.”

The Catholic News Agency, which criticized the production since it opened, also slated Toibin as an ex-Catholic. The Testament Of Mary “depicted the Virgin Mary as a doubting skeptic who thought Jesus died in vain, and failed to attract a large audience and closed on Sunday less than two weeks after it opened,” they wrote.