The truth,” says Cripple Billy, the title character in “The Cripple of Inishmaan,” “is always less hard than you fear it’s going to be.” But the truth does seem less hard when delivered in the silky language and vinegary humor of the Irish. For more than a century now, fans of drama, literature and song have cast their eyes Eire-ward for that harsh reality laced with lyricism, for that stream of great yarns peopled by irascible rogues. We never tire of the blarney, and the Emerald Isle never tires of sending forth blarney-makers who cut to the soul and make us laugh and weep.
The great Irish playwrighting movement — the boom that gave us Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Sean O’Casey, John Millington Synge and Samuel Beckett — is supposed to have ended. But a new crop of young dramatists is wowing critics and playgoers in London, New York and, this spring and summer, the Chicago area.
This small shipload of major new talent arrives as part of a broader motherlode of Emerald gold, from Frank McCourt’s triumphant “Angela’s Ashes” to earlier accomplishments in rock music and film.
McCourt, whose irreverent stage history of the Irish in America, “The Irish . . . And How They Got That Way,” is playing at the Mercury Theater on Chicago’s North Side, sees a broad trend. “It goes back for 20 years and includes the likes of Van Morrison, O’Connor and U2 in music and Jim Sheridan and Neil Jordan in films,” he says. “The economic boom in Ireland has meant more travel and more freedom, more exposure to forces outside the country, while at the same time a series of revelations about sexual acts by priests has broken the church’s authority. Censorship is in decline, and that’s opening up new areas of expression.”
And there’s that age-old Irish recipe: “The language is a result of the barren landscape,” McCourt says. “There’s nothing in that country but language. No art, no architecture, no great symphonic music. There’s only folk tales and song and all that talk, talk, talk.”
Perhaps nowhere has the Irish movement been more apparent than in the theater. Prolific Martin McDonagh, at 28, managed three New York productions in the last two years, two on Broadway and one at the Public Theatre downtown. His heartbreaking, hilarious “The Cripple of Inishmaan” just opened at Evanston’s Northlight Theatre, and last season’s Tony Award-winning triumph, “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” arrives in July at Steppenwolf Theatre, starring Laurie Metcalf in what promises to be her best stage role in years.
Another hotshot, 27-year-old Conor McPherson, just saw his play, “The Weir,” open on Broadway to rave reviews. Toss in Sebastian Barry, author of “The Steward of Christendom,” which played Chicago last season, and Billy Roche, whose “Belfry” played earlier this year, both at the Organic Theater, and you have the makings of a renaissance.
“It may well just be an accident of timing,” says Randall Arney, who will direct Steppenwolf’s “Beauty Queen,” his first project here since resigning as artistic director of the troupe four years ago. “But there is an upsurge in Irish storytelling, and these new dramatists seem to be steeped in the old tradition and graced with contemporary voices too.”
All three boast Gothic characters, dry wit and that hint of sorcery second nature to the traditional Irish imagination. “Cripple” is not only about a Tiny Tim-like disabled boy but a pair of maidenly aunts, one of whom talks to stones in times of stress; a bullying egg girl who breaks her wares on her brother’s head for punishment; a village gossip who encourages his mother’s drinking as a way to rush her to her grave; and the remarkable but actual fact that famed documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty came to the play’s remote setting to make a movie in 1934.
In “The Weir,” characters gather at a small pub and tell a series of ghost stories. McPherson, who spent most of his youth in Dublin and only visited relatives from time to time in the remote region in which “The Weir” is set, admits the ghosts are a matter of his heritage.
“I think we’re preoccupied with ghosts in Ireland because of Catholicism,” he said in a phone interview from Dublin, where he’s in the middle of filming a screen adaptation of another of his plays, “The Lime Tree Bower.” “When you’re brought up to believe there’s another world after this one and that there are forces of good and evil, that there’s a devil and that Jesus will save you, you naturally develop a sense of the supernatural. Because, basically, you’re scared.”
McDonagh, meanwhile, who has spent much of his brief life in London, declines most interview requests (including this one) and reportedly acts in ways inviting comparison to the rebellious likes of Wilde and that roustabout Brendan Behan, a hard-living playwrighting great of the ’50s and ’60s. McDonagh was in Los Angeles when “Beauty Queen” played there and reportedly declined to attend the production.
There is a great deal to both playwrights beyond good storytelling and bad behavior. The current plays graft a new sensibility onto the old world of Irish convention. In “Inishmaan,” set in the ’30s, the language, even when spoken by young women and old maids, is fraught with four-letter curses and blunt sex talk, including allusions to priestly abuse.
And while the setting, story and characters sometimes recall Synge’s “Playboy of the Western World,” “Inishmaan” is crafted with an ornate plot mosaic full of surprise twists and endless cross-references more reminiscent of Czechoslovakian-born Tom Stoppard than Synge.
The hardness of the truth, too, to echo Cripple Billy, seems a modern hardness. The mother and daughter in “Beauty Queen,” for instance, battle with a cruelty reminiscent of current headlines of family torture and neglect. (The mother tosses her overnight urine in the kitchen sink and burns her lonely daughter’s wedding proposal, while the daughter burns her mother with scalding water.)
In “The Weir,” the series of otherworldly monologues ends in a devastating modern tale of a mother losing her child. When asked about his influences as a playwright, McPherson cited not an Irishman but Chicagoan David Mamet.
“McDonagh writes with such a modern sense of humor,” Arney says of “Beauty Queen,” though he could well be talking about “Inishmaan” and McPherson’s “The Weir.” “That’s what keeps the play from becoming oppressive. It’s told with this twinkle in the eye. If anything, it reminds me of `Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?’ that same oppressive kind of relationship, and yet it takes you on such a wonderful ride. We’re so used to sitting down and listening to Irish stories, we’re lulled at first into thinking we’re in familiar territory.
“And then, it’s as if he locks the door behind you and starts to horrify.”
B.J. Jones, who staged “Inishmaan” at Northlight, finds the same confluence of dark comedy, classic tragedy and pathos in “Inishmaan.”
“When I first read this play, I got a tingle at the base of my spine,” says Jones, an Irish-American. “I truly understood the sense of humor and brutality in the relationships. You can’t be more cruel than the Irish, and you can’t be more loving, either. It’s tribal, and they cling, like those rocks in the Western counties. I grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood in Cleveland, and working on this play, exploring Cripple Billy’s own dreams of escape, reminded me of my own growing up, of why I wanted to get out.”
