Fresh Eire

...On Stage FRESH " EIRE BY DEAN VALENTINE ^L^Frian Friel, a 49-year-old Irishman, is among the most important playwrights at work today He is a master of the naturalistic drama, with a perfect ear for the way people of all stations talk and an unwavering compassion for how they live He is also an innovator whose formal breakthroughs have enriched the theater's ability to render the complex relationship between man's private soul and his social self In a happy coincidence, two of Friel's plays, Philadelphia, Here I Come1 (1965) and Freedom of the City (1973), are being staged off-Broadway, viewing them both allows a unique appreciation of his undervalued talent Philadelphia—and I suppose this is an uncertain distinction—was Broadway's longest running show about Ireland It concerns a young, lower-mid-dle-class man, Gareth O'Donnell, who, no longer able to tolerate his life in the small town of Ballybeg, decides to pack it in and leave for America ?a vast, restless place that doesn't give a curse about the past " Friel's point is that the past is everything, that in America commerce in myths—cowboys, gangsteis, oversexed dumb blondes, etc —has replaced the authentic human intercourse which can exist only when one remains in touch with one's heritage For the most part, the play is good, solid work with convincingly drawn characters (particularly Madge, the housekeeper), lyrically simple dialogue and believably low-key action What makes Philadelphia exciting, however, is Friel's introduction of an intriguing device whose essentials he went on to refine in later works with stunning effect the splitting of the hero into a private and public persona, with a different actor playing each role According to the author's notes, "Public Gar is the Gar people see, talk to, talk about Private Gar is the unseen man, the man within, the conscience, the alter ego, the secret thoughts, the id " The advantage of this division is that it multiplies the layers of meaning by the use of irony (The public Gar, for instance, could be despondently wishing his cohorts farewell as the private exclaims how little he will miss their silly lies and bravado ) In addition, it torces the audience to adopt a double perspective on what is happening before it, preventing total identification and allowing it to make deeper judgment of behavior The potential of this technique, especially with two strong actors in the lead role, quickly becomes apparent in the SoHo Rep's production of Philadelphia, where Tom Sminkey and Stephen Novelli elegantly play off against each other like the brass and strings in a symphony Nevertheless, the idea was, at this juncture in Friel's career, still in its infancy, too frequently one Gareth could have accomplished as much as two The form here outstripped the content By the time of Lovers (1968), though, it had been considerably developed In that tragic tale of star-crossed love, interrupted by the voices of two old people standing on the sidelines who recite facts and figures, it was a framing device, related to but not directly part of the main action Its next appearance was in Freedom of the City, a masterpiece that dramatizes one of the 20th century's great dilemmas the necessity of engaging in politics in an era where politics has begun to look, at best, like the art of cynical manipulation, and at worst, like indifferent butchery The curtain rises on three dead people sprawled across the stage A photographer enters and snaps pictures, then a priest hastily blesses each body in turn Suddenly, the lights rivet on a judge, who intones these words as he faces the audience "This tribunal of enquiry, appointed by Her Majesty's government, is in no sense a court of justice Our only function is to form an objective view of the events which occurred in the Citv of Londonderry, Northern Ireland, on the tenth day of February 1970, when after a civil rights meeting British troops opened tire and three civilians lost their lives It is essentially a factfinding e\cercise, and our concern and our only concern is with the period ot time when these three people came together, seized possession ol a civil building and openly defied the security Ioilcs Whatever conclusion may seem to emerge, it must be understood that it is none of our function to make moral judgments " So, we know that it is all of our function to make moral judgments To complicate our task, Fnel provides two plays, just as he previously provided two Gareths The private play is realist drama in the best Ibsemte tradition It tells of how three impoverished marchers—Michael Hegarty, an unemployed lout, Skinner, a flip roisterer, and Elizabeth Doherty, the mother of 11—find themselves occupying the plush office of the Mayor of Londonderry after fleeing the tear gas sprayed by the English during a peaceful but illegal demonstration A large part of this story is dedicated to showing that there is no such person as the average man—there are only individuals, beloved of God, with fragile hopes and accumulated bitterness over wasted lives More important, these particular people have maintained their dignity and humanity in mad Ireland, where everything—albeit the English and poverty most of all—conspires against the survival of the essential virtues Yet we are soon given to understand that these are victims—not merely of oppression but of their own deluded placidity When an officer demands for the second time that they surrender, the trio put their hands over their heads and march out —to be instantly mowed down by the troops The low level of their political consciousness led them to underestimate their enemy, they are thus responsible for their own deaths Moral People need politics The public play is an Epic drama in the best Brechtian tradition It consists of vignettes, strategically interspersed throughout the realist play, that recount how segments of the society —the government, the army, the Church, the Irish chauvinists, acade-mia, and the media—filter the tragedy through then- respective jargons, and then use it for their own purposes The government, represented by the judge, and the Army, represented by Brigadier Johnson-Hansbury, paint the accidental occupation as a terrorist act meant to deal England a symbolic blow, and as too effective to go unpunished The Church points to the triple murder as an example of where radicalism?godless Communism" —will lead the ingenuous The sociologist talks about the subculture of poverty, and how the poor are more in tune with their animal natures And the media, the dupes of officialdom, make the deaths into an event full of instant pathos and solemnity But perhaps the most interesting reaction is the patriots', presented through the mouth of a drunken bal-ladeer in a pub "A hundred Irish heroes one February day/Took over Der-ry's Guildhall, beside old Derry's quay /They defied the British Army, they defied the R U C /They showed the crumbhn' empire what good Irishmen could be " Political requirements turn people—even dead ones—into symbols of a cause Moral Politics destroys Which play—the public or the private—are we to believe7 The judgment is ours Regrettably, this brilliant, tortured drama is given a pigheaded production at the Irish Arts Center While some of the acting is passable, director Jim Olwell has failed in what I consider a simster way He has transformed Freedom of the City into an anti-Bn-tish propaganda vehicle This is to do it the gravest injustice, for the play is about nothing if it is not about the chasm that separates propaganda from art, the dead word from the living TZ" M enneth Tynan once remarked that "When you've seen all of Ionesco's plays, you've seen one " The quip applies as well to one-man shows In the last few years we have witnessed a Mark Twain show, a Will Rogers, a Clarence Darrow, a Theodore Roosevelt, a Harry Truman, a Paul Robeson, a Charles Dickens, a Brendan Behan, and now (I have probably skipped some, but never mind), a George Bernard Shaw These figures have very little in common The actors doing the roles have very little in common—except when they happen to be James Whit-more The writers who write and compile the scripts have very little in common The wonder, therefore, is how so much diversity creates so much conformity For one play may be about Dickens and another about Roosevelt, but the only difference between them is the actor's makeup Nobody planned it that way It's simply that the genre itself enforces a restricted range of emotion—from sociability to sociability Hence, the celebrity on display is always raffish, charming, has an eye for the ladies, you bet, and feels deeply for the hoi polloi without being un-tactful enough to make an issue of it Even GBS, in playwright Michael Vecsey's lackluster My Astonishing Self at the Astor Place Theater, must conform to this tired and untrue formula, and the result is that the Bard of Ayot St Lawrence, as Time is fond of calling Shaw, becomes the one thing he never was—boring, because pre-i dictable True, we are given plenty of smart lines—including Shaw's explanation for his vegetarianism ("A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses"), and a hilarious bit about his hatred of the medical profession There is, too, a recreation of Shaw's marvelous BBC speech delivered on the eve of World War II, recommending that the old men be sent to the Front But on the whole, Vecsey's Shaw must go on—and on, and on, trying to charm, generally without success Not that Donal Donnelly is a bad actor —far from it, although he does overdo some gestures (such as placing his hands on his hips and staring defiantly out at the world), and a couple of accentual patterns become grating after the fifth or sixth recurrence No, the problem is with the one-man show This solipsistic, lonely creature, at its deepest level, is antidramatic It dispenses with the diversity of human emotion in favor of mere amusement and theatricality—and there is already too much of that around...