O’Reilly, Ciaran

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    ‘Agreement’ and ‘Philadelphia, Here I Come!,’ Two Irish Imports

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    “Agreement,” at Irish Arts Center, and “Philadelphia, Here I Come!,” at Irish Repertory Theater, have a timeless feel, rooted in their eras and resonant in ours.In more placid times, it would be downright bizarre to classify Owen McCafferty’s political drama “Agreement” as feel-good entertainment.In these fraught, belligerent times, though, there is comfort, even a twinge of hope, in the play’s retelling of the knotty negotiations that finally made an enduring peace possible in Northern Ireland. Part of the United Kingdom, it was long violently divided between Catholics and the Protestant majority, with republicans wanting the region to join the predominantly Catholic Republic of Ireland and unionists vehemently opposed. After decades of blood-soaked warring — and bitter, sectarian score-keeping about who did what to whom — the Good Friday Agreement pointed a different way forward.It sounds like the makings of theater for wonks, doesn’t it? Seven politicians holed up together in Belfast in April 1998, battling their way toward consensus as the clock ticks down. Tony Blair, the British prime minister, has a family vacation to get to in Spain, so they need to complete the deal by Thursday. In Charlotte Westenra’s impeccably acted production for Lyric Theater, Belfast, the group blows past that deadline and a delirious dream ballet erupts — all of these exhausted people suddenly dancing.“Agreement,” at Irish Arts Center in Manhattan, is generally less colorful than that, and its barrage of contentious details can be overwhelming. But really, negotiations are stuck on the same few specifics: power sharing, economic cooperation, the decommissioning of paramilitary weapons and the release of prisoners.The show’s most teasing joke is having the career pacifist John Hume (Dan Gordon), the gentlest pol in the room, ask the audience whether there’s any need for him to explain an elusive central point yet again. Whereupon he does not clarify.“You all get it, don’t you?” Hume says, moving briskly along. “And if you haven’t — pay attention!”In the rushing current of this play, what buoys us isn’t the particularities but rather the personalities. Mo Mowlam (Andrea Irvine), the flagrantly unpretentious British secretary of state for Northern Ireland and the only woman in the mix; Gerry Adams (Chris Corrigan), the leader of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, who turns out to be good for a wisecrack at a urinal; Bertie Ahern (Ronan Leahy), the Irish premier, freshly in mourning for his mother and showing up anyway — this is a charismatic bunch.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Endgame’ Review: A Laugh at the Apocalypse?

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      There’s plenty of pleasure to be found at the end of the world in the Irish Repertory Theater production of Samuel Beckett’s play.The dog is a small, stuffed toy, pathetic and adorable all at once. A sewing project in progress, he has a patchwork coat, three legs so far — and zero genitals, because those are going to be the finishing touch.Hamm, the volatile, unseeing tyrant in Samuel Beckett’s “Endgame,” has ordered the creation of this cloth companion: one more creature to shrink from him in the dreary, age-worn room that is his realm.“Can he stand?” Hamm asks.Placed on the floor by Hamm’s much-abused attendant, Clov, the pup promptly falls over — right on his snout at the performance I saw the other afternoon at Irish Repertory Theater. It’s the silliest bit of slapstick, and (with a vital assist from Deirdre Brennan, who made the dog) it works just as well as it must have when Beckett dreamed it up in the 1950s. You can almost feel the playwright, a great fan of physical comedy, winking from beyond the grave.It’s not the only time you get that sense in this revival, starring the Shakespearean actor John Douglas Thompson as Hamm and the actor-clown Bill Irwin, a Beckett aficionado, as Clov. When Clov points his telescope at the audience and tells Hamm, “I see a multitude in transports of joy,” that’s Beckett having a little joke with us.Joy is hardly the operative word, of course, in this post-apocalyptic play about the direness of the human condition. But pleasure? There’s plenty of that to be found in Ciaran O’Reilly’s main-stage production, whose requisite grimness is edged with the gorgeousness of performances that are sly, vivid and pulsingly alive.On a set by Charlie Corcoran, this “Endgame” looks just as the playwright meticulously specifies: the bare room with two meager windows so high up that a ladder is needed to reach them; the armchair on wheels, in which Hamm, who cannot walk, spends his days; the two trash cans off to the side, in which his parents live.Around Hamm’s neck hangs a whistle, and when he blows it to summon the beaten-down Clov, it is piercingly shrill — a sound to cut through far more noise and distance than ever separate them. Really, a dulcet bell would do. But this is how Hamm prefers to punctuate the dreary sameness of his days: with bursts of unprovoked aggression that send Clov scrambling to placate him.“Why do you stay with me?” Hamm asks — a fair question, as he is capricious and cruel.“Why do you keep me?” Clov counters.“There’s no one else,” Hamm says.“There’s nowhere else,” Clov replies.They can’t go on. They go on.Likewise Hamm’s parents, Nagg (an endearing Joe Grifasi) and Nell (an exquisite Patrice Johnson Chevannes). They pop up from their respective garbage cans to bicker, joke and flirt with each other, though they’re just too far apart to share a smooch. They laugh raucously at the memory of the accident that claimed their legs and reminisce dreamily about a boat ride they enjoyed in Italy. Whatever bleak horror they’re enduring now, pain is old hat to them, and they did know beauty once.“Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that,” Nell says.It’s one of the play’s most famous lines. Still, is it accurate?Amid the bleak horror of the play, Hamm’s parents, played by Patrice Johnson Chevannes, left, and Joe Grifasi, happily reminisce about the days when they still had their legs.Sara KrulwichClov is miserable, but that’s not what makes him comical as he hauls his stiff-legged body up and down his ladder. Dressed in calico-cat colors by the costume designer Orla Long, and looking like he’s stepped out of a Vermeer canvas that’s browned with age, he has the manner of a captive sprite and a physicality that is pure clown. His muttering rebelliousness is clownish, too.And Hamm, seated in a chair that’s as much a throne as the one Thompson occupied when he played the title role in “The Emperor Jones” at Irish Rep, is funny because he’s ridiculous, vain and at ease with his own disgustingness. The grossest comic line in “Endgame” — a joke that feels like a nod to Beckett’s luxuriantly crude friend James Joyce — belongs to Hamm. What fun it is to watch Thompson, so often cast in somber roles, land it impeccably.This is not to say that the play is a laugh riot. In 1956, as Beckett was writing it, he described it as “Rather difficult and elliptic, mostly depending on the power of the text to claw, more inhuman than ‘Godot.’”All true, yet in the humor he built into that text, he left more space for humanness than the play’s reputation suggests. Despair is the dominant note, but where there is laughter there is hope. This is not sheer nihilism.“We’re not beginning to, to, mean something?” Hamm asks.“Mean something! You and I, mean something!” Clov says, and breaks into a smile. “Ah, that’s a good one!”EndgameThrough March 12 at Irish Repertory Theater, Manhattan; irishrep.org. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. More

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      Review: In ‘The Butcher Boy,’ an Anti-Coming of Age Story

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      The new musical, based on the novel by Patrick McCabe, follows a boy in 1960s Ireland as he recounts a tale of childhood mischief and alienation.They creep in from the shadows, snorting and snickering. The singing pigs that skulk and shimmy through “The Butcher Boy,” which opened on Monday at the Irish Repertory Theater, are silly but also half menacing. Below the neck, they’re dressed like townspeople in 1960s Ireland, where the new musical, written and composed by Asher Muldoon, is set. From the jowls up, however, their snout-nosed masks are eerily impassive.The swine chorus appears to be a totem of indecency, embodying the dark and unknown depths of the show’s narrator, Francie (Nicholas Barasch), a jaunty lad with flame-colored hair and an implacably sunny disposition. In his upbeat brogue, Francie recounts a tale of boyhood mischief and alienation with a zeal that belies what seems to be the threat of promised violence. If there’s danger lurking beneath his gleaming grin, Francie may be a bit too good at hiding the knife.Based on the 1992 novel by Patrick McCabe, “The Butcher Boy” presents a myopic view of a troubled upbringing — call it an anti-coming of age tale. Francie claims that his adolescence was idyllic, though scenes in the musical plainly prove otherwise. He and his best friend (Christian Strange) fish and carouse and steal comic books from a nerdy classmate (Daniel Marconi), whose mother (Michele Ragusa) fatefully derides Francie and his parents on the basis of social class, calling them pigs.Barasch with, from left, Teddy Trice, David Baida, Carey Rebecca Brown and Polly McKie in “The Butcher Boy,” a new musical based on the 1992 novel by Patrick McCabe.Jeenah Moon for The New York Times“It was a sweet and simple time,” Francie sings as his father (Scott Stangland) belts him across the butt. “We were happy,” he says before walking in on his mother (Andrea Lynn Green) about to hang herself from a fuse wire. The motormouthed Francie turns to the audience with asides and misdirections that dissemble as much as they reveal.In the novel, McCabe’s prose is propulsive and unpredictable, bordering on stream of consciousness and bubbling with proto-punk sensibility, not unlike Irvine Welsh’s “Trainspotting,” published in Scotland a year later.But putting a narrator as unreliable as Francie at the helm of a stage musical is a tricky business. Should an audience believe what they hear or what they see? That depends on which is more convincing, and the results here are tough to decipher. Is Francie fooling only himself, or is he trying to fool everyone else? The answer often seems to be both, and it’s a difficult deception for a performer to pull off, particularly while recounting and participating in two and a half hours’ worth of action.“The Butcher Boy” might have been finessed into a sharper, more forceful black comedy if the score from Muldoon, who is not yet a senior in college, had developed a more distinctive point of view. Its dutiful tour through Broadway-style pop, vaudeville and Irish influences is largely referential.The production, directed by Ciaran O’Reilly, uses graphic shorthand to suggest the tension between Francie’s insular mind and the outside world. The wood-slatted walls of the set by Charlie Corcoran resemble a treehouse, while an oversize rendering of a turn-dial TV serves as a backdrop for Dan Scully’s projections. The screen looms large over the compact stage, nodding briefly to the turmoil of the 1960s and to Francie’s taste for “The Twilight Zone,” but the significance of mass media to Francie’s tortured descent is either overstated or underplayed.“The Butcher Boy” centers Francie’s perspective to a fault, so that the convictions of other characters are mediated through his own. It’s a powerful concept but requires a delicate physics that staging a story in three dimensions tends to defy. When characters who are without emotional agency express themselves in song, whose heartstrings can they claim to be pulling? Francie seems determined to prove that he himself has none.There are promising moments of affecting sentiment at the conclusion of Muldoon’s score, in ballads that seem to offer unlikely resolution, before Francie yanks it away with a still indeterminate rage. But by the time Francie’s own mask finally falls, the revelation feels oddly bloodless.The Butcher BoyThrough Sept. 11 at the Irish Repertory Theater, Manhattan; irishrep.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      Review: The Melancholy of Misspent Lives in ‘Autumn Royal’

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      The Irish Repertory Theater returns to live performances with a domestic tragicomedy by Kevin Barry.Above the narrow little room where May and Timothy sit plotting, their father lies abed, his wits gone haywire. Sometimes, from below, they hear him speak the first and only line of the poem he’s been composing for months: “A duck walk across a puddle.”In just those six words, the bird exhibits more agency than May and Tim have shown for years, maybe ever. Well into adulthood, they remain trapped in the same house in Cork, Ireland, where they’ve spent their whole lives — caring for their father and passing cruelly amusing judgment on the neighbors.“The Coynes all had the big, beefy faces,” May says, gazing out the window as one of them walks by. Then comes the withering, tossed-off insult: “Whatever they did wrong in a past life.”Even so, an ingrained dread of what the neighbors might think has kept her and Tim in line, ministering to the man upstairs — May taking on the dirty work, like sponge baths, that Tim claims to be too delicate for.But in Kevin Barry’s domestic tragicomedy, “Autumn Royal,” the first live performance at the Irish Repertory Theater since the start of the pandemic, the time for rebellion has come. Because as unwell as their father might seem, his lab results point to years, maybe decades, more of life.“What are we goin’ to do, May?” asks Tim, who nurses a detailed fantasy of escaping to Australia, where he will surf daily, find a little blond wife and have two children with her named Jason and Mary-Lou.If you’re familiar with Barry’s fiction, like his grim and gorgeous novel “Night Boat to Tangier,” you know that the moral brokenness of his often wildly hilarious characters can take extravagantly violent turns. May (a very funny Maeve Higgins) and Tim (John Keating, ditto) certainly are tempted, in the interest of securing their own freedom.Once they summon their courage, though, the gravest infraction they can commit starts with leafing through the yellow pages, in search of a nursing home. The place they choose is the Autumn Royal — where, Tim says, his guilt slipping out, “There’s only two to a cell.” But ridding themselves of their father isn’t as easy as shipping him off.Ciaran O’Reilly’s production, on Charlie Corcoran’s suitably claustrophobic set, is wonderfully agile with Barry’s comedy but never finds its footing with the intimations of trauma threaded through the script. A revelation near the end doesn’t land with the emotional heft it needs, and neither does the play.In the more surreal moments of painful memory, busy projections (by Dan Scully) crowd the walls, demanding attention, when a less embellished design approach — a change of lighting, say — would have kept the focus on Barry’s language, which is already heavy with atmosphere. Similarly, the sound design (by Ryan Rumery and Hidenori Nakajo) muddies when it means to clarify.This production succeeds mainly on the level of a caper, albeit one spiked with melancholy about squandered lives. Reminiscing about how beautiful their long-split parents once were, Tim laments to his sister, “They could have had magnificent children.”“We’re never going to get past ourselves here, Tim,” May says.Weighed down by duty, stalled by inertia, maybe she’s right.Autumn RoyalThrough Nov. 21 at the Irish Repertory Theater, Manhattan; irishrep.org. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. More

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      New York Theaters Are Dark, but These Windows Light Up With Art

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      The Irish Repertory Theater is streaming poetry readings, and Playwrights Horizons and St. Ann’s Warehouse are showcasing art dealing with race and injustice.Like many cultural organizations, the Irish Repertory Theater in Manhattan has streamed pandemic programming on its website.But a few days ago, the theater added a new sort of broadcast to its repertoire, setting up two 60-inch screens in windows that face the sidewalk, installing speakers high up on the building facade and airing a collection of films that show people reading poems in Ireland, London and New York.On a recent morning, Ciaran O’Reilly, the Rep’s producing director, stood by the theater on West 22nd Street, gazing at the screens as they displayed Joseph Aldous, an actor in Britain, reading “An Advancement of Learning,” a narrative poem by Seamus Heaney describing a brief standoff with a rat along a river bank.“These are not dark windows,” O’Reilly said. “They are lit up with poetry, with music, with the words of actors who are performing.”In the past year, theaters and other performing arts institutions in New York have turned to creative means to bring works to the public, sometimes also injecting a bit of life into otherwise shuttered facades. Those arrangements continue, even as the State of New York has announced that arts venues can reopen in April at one-third capacity and some outdoor performances, like Shakespeare in the Park, are scheduled to resume.The panes of glass, though, have provided a safe space. Late last year, for instance, the artists Christopher Williams, Holly Bass and Raja Feather Kelly performed at different times in the lobby or in a smaller vestibule-like part of the building in Chelsea occupied by New York Live Arts. All were visible through glass to those outside.Three more performances by Kelly of “Hysteria,” in which he assumes the role of a pink-hued extraterrestrial and explores what Live Arts’ website calls “pop culture and its displacement of queer Black subjectivity,” are scheduled for April 8-10.The Mexican-American artist Ken Gonzales-Day’s photographs of sculptures are on display at Playwrights Horizons.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnother street-level performance took place behind glass last December in Downtown Brooklyn, where the Brooklyn Ballet staged nine 20-minute shows of select dances from its “Nutcracker.”The ballet turned its studio into what its artistic director, Lynn Parkerson, called a “jewel box” theater; chose dances that kept masked ballerinas socially distanced; and used barricades on the sidewalk to limit audiences.“It was a way to bring some people back to something they love that they enjoyed that they might be forgetting about,” Parkerson said in an interview. “It did feel like a real performance.”She said that live performances were planned for April and would include ballet members in “Pas de Deux,” set to Jean-Philippe Rameau’s “Gavotte et Six Doubles,” with live music by the pianist Simone Dinnerstein.Pop-up concerts have been arranged by the Kaufman Music Center on the Upper West Side, in a storefront — the address is not given but is described on the center’s website as “not hard to find” — north of Columbus Circle.Those performances, running through late April, are announced at the storefront the same day, to limit crowd sizes and encourage social distancing. Participants have included the violinist Gil Shaham, the mezzo-soprano Chrystal E. Williams, the Gabrielle Stravelli Trio and JACK Quartet.St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn is displaying Julian Alexander and Khadijat Oseni’s “Supremacy Project,” public art that addresses the nature of injustice in American society.The word “supremacy” is superimposed on a photograph of police officers in riot gear, and there are images by Michael T. Boyd of Sandra Bland, Elijah McClain and Emmett Till.And at Playwrights Horizons in Midtown, the Mexican-American artist Ken Gonzales-Day is placing photographs of sculptures of human figures in display cases, encouraging viewers to reckon with definitions of beauty and race. Those displays are part of rotating public art series organized by the artist, activist, and writer Avram Finkelstein and the set and costume designer David Zinn.The aim, Finkelstein said in January when the series was announced, was to display work that “makes constructive use of dormant facades to create a transient street museum” and to “remind the city of its buoyancy and originality.”O’Reilly, at the Irish Rep, said the theater heard last year from Amy Holmes, the executive director of the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation, who thought the theater might provide a good venue to air some of the short films the organization had commissioned to make poetry part of an immersive experience.The series being shown at the theater, called “Poetic Reflections: Words Upon the Window Pane,” comprises 21 short pieces by the Irish filmmaker Matthew Thompson.“These are not dark windows,” said Ciaran O’Reilly of the Irish Repertory Theater. “They are lit up with poetry, with music, with the words of actors who are performing.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThey show contemporary poets reading their own works as well as poets and actors reading works by others, including William Butler Yeats and J.M. Synge, and were produced in collaboration with Poetry Ireland in Dublin, Druid Theater in Galway, the 92nd Street Y in New York and Poet in the City in London.“I think there is something special about encountering the arts in an unexpected way in the city, especially an art form like poetry,” Holmes said.The readers in the films include people who were born in Ireland, immigrants to Ireland, people who live in Britain and a few from the United States, like Denice Frohman, who was born and raised in New York City.Frohman was on the theater’s screens on Tuesday night, reading lines like “the beaches are gated & no one knows the names of the dead” from her poem “Puertopia,” when Erin Madorsky and Dorian Baker stopped to listen.Baker said he saw the films playing in the window as symbolizing a “revitalization of poetic energy.”Madorsky had regularly attended theatrical performances before the pandemic but now missed that connection, she said, and was gratified to happen upon a dramatic reading while walking home.She added that the sound of the verses being read stood in contrast to what she called the city’s “standard” backdrop of blaring horns, sirens and rumbling garbage trucks.“I think it’s wonderful,” she said. “There’s something so soothing about her voice, it just pulled me in.” More