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.