You can bet your last pint on it. If the Tom Murphy play “Bailegangaire” were relatively easy to interpret it would be as familiar to American stage audiences as the best-traveled works of genteel Brian Friel, or gentility-challenged Martin McDonaugh, whose harsh familial melodrama “Beauty Queen of Leenane” owes a great debt to Murphy.
Popular in Ireland and in England, Murphy’s 1985 tale–pronounced “Bahlya-gan-GARH-uh” and meaning “town without laughter” in Gaelic–relays a story of a haunted West Ireland crone and her two grown granddaughters. It’s a formidable, densely verbal challenge to both actors and audiences. Irish Rep’s season opener, now at the upstairs Victory Gardens Theater, by and large meets the challenge, though it’s a paradox: a frequently tough slog that ends up being very moving.
Mommo (Mary Ann Thebus, looking like Shakespeare’s Ophelia a few years after getting fished out of the brook) is a lost, senile soul, cared for by granddaughter Mary (wire-taut Elizabeth Rich, the production’s strongest aspect).
With various repetitions, like a mad tape loop, Mommo relays a story of a farmer and his wife who stop in at a pub one night, where a so-called “laughing contest” commences between the stranger and a local man.
Mary, who has given up her life to care for Mommo, has heard this never-ending story’s particulars often enough. Yet she presses Mommo to reveal more of what lies beneath. Mary’s sister Dolly (Michelle Courvais) thinks it’s all blather, but she has preoccupations of her own.
Murphy packs Mommo’s shadowy tale with a lot of novelistic detail. Some of the turns of phrase are exquisite, as when a frown is described as “disappearing up the stranger’s cap.” But tracking those details, and Mommo’s larger narrative, isn’t easy.
Also, Mommo is by design an exasperating and windy character and while Thebus has her moments–she’s very funny when Mommo displays her first signs of levity, reveling in thoughts of suitors past–she lays everything out to a too-steady rhythm.
Both play and production gradually exert a pull, however, at least for the hardy and patient. Director Kay Martinovich doesn’t fuss around with any big whammies or overhyped melodramatics. She’s aided by the drably evocative setting provided by Eric Appleton, a tiny cottage interior where the peat logs emit the kind of warmth Murphy’s three women have been so long denied.
ALSO SEEN: At the Lakeshore Theater, WNEP’s “Bad Judgment Day” by Clay and Nate Sander is a weak comedy about a financially strapped church caught up in hijinks involving a riverboat casino, a couple of would-be “Pulp Fiction” hit men and their mysterious boss. Lowjinks is more like it, or lamejinks.
Jeff Griggs, as an exceptionally angry Christian and James Yeater, as the Fred Willard-like pastor in hot water, do what they can to appease the gods of comedy.
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“Bailegangaire”
When: Through Feb. 15
Where: Irish Repertory at Victory
Gardens Theater, 2257 N. Lincoln Ave.
Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes
Tickets: $32-$36
Phone: 773-871-3000
