Theater Review: O'Casey’s ‘Juno and the Paycock,’ at the Irish Repertory Theatre

“When anyone asks me about the Irish character, I say look at the trees: maimed, stark and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious,” Edna O’Brien has written. This observation by the Irish woman of letters stems largely from her experience in post-independence County Clare in the rural west, but it applies just as strongly, perhaps even more so, in Dublin a few decades before, as the land was wracked first by rebellion, then by civil war.

The plight of women in the city’s poorest, strife-torn tenements found an unusually sympathetic chronicler in Sean O’Casey, a man who cut so constantly against the grain of his society as a Protestant Socialist in increasingly Catholic nationalist Ireland that critic-novelist Thomas Flanagan called him "the quintessential Irishman who is always 'agin' whatever movement he is a part of." 

The playwright’s mix of comedy and tragedy, along with his proletarian and antiwar sympathies, are what usually get emphasized in productions of Juno and the Paycock. But many audience members will find many proto-feminist notes sounded in the production from New York’s Irish Repertory Theatre that will close on Sunday.

Juno and the Paycock is one third of a trilogy of O’Casey’s dramedies, originally staged in 1924 by the Abbey Theatre. In the play, losses occur as much in the home as on the war-torn streets of the time, as, in fratricidal warfare, the Irish soldiers who had once battled Britain for independence now turned on each other in a civil war resulting from a treaty that gave greater self-government but not a complete break from Britain. 

I discussed previously the other two plays in this group: The Shadow of a Gunman and The Plough and the Stars.  Generally considered the finest of the three, Juno and the Paycock also formed the basis for the Marc Blitzstein opera Juno.

The Irish Repertory does not have the technical resources of the Roundabout Theatre Co., which staged it in a fall 2000 production that I attended, starring Derbhla Molloy and Jim Norton in the eponymous roles. 

But that does not work to the disadvantage of the play; in fact, it heightens the audience’s sense of the physical and emotional claustrophobia afflicting the tenement residents of the play.

“Juno,” the nickname of middle-aged wife and mother June Boyle, conjures up an ancient goddess, in marked contrast to her actual position as a beleaguered Dublin housewife trying desperately to keep her family intact. 

The major source of her problems is her husband, “Captain” Jack Boyle (played wonderfully by the Irish Repertory’s co-founder, Ciaran O’Reilly), who is not merely improvident but downright parasitical in dealing with his wife. 

Daughter Mary (played by Mary Mallen) has, as a result of her reading, taken up the cause of labor, which only ends up getting her fired from her job. 

Most worrisome of all might be son Johnny, a onetime quartermaster in the Irish Republican Army, who has been left with nothing for his service but an amputated arm, a limp and screams while asleep.

Into the Boyles’ darkened, dingy lives come improbable rays of sunshine. A schoolteacher, a new beau of Mary’s, not only offers her the possibility of a like-minded spirit but the entire family the chance to escape their poverty via a will of a relative of Jack’s that he has drawn. 

But by the final curtain, Juno will have to summon even greater reserves of courage and dignity, as triple catastrophe descends on the Boyles.

“The whole world is in a terrible state o’ chassis!” Jack moans—but he, like virtually all the men in the play, is at a loss over what to do about it. Whenever he hears of the chance of a job, he suddenly develops an incapacitating malady. 

Even the best male in the play, a well-meaning former boyfriend of Mary’s, cannot surmount traditional contemporary notions of feminine virtue.

Under the expert direction of Charlotte Moore, the cast strikes the right notes in balancing the tragedy that is never far from these tenement-trapped characters and the humor that relieves it. 

The great majority of the cast matches up quite well, physically, as described by the playwright himself, particularly John Keating as Jack’s fair-weather drinking buddy “Joxer” Daly, embodying to the life the character’s “spare…loosely built” frame and “cunning twinkle.”

But the powerful centerpiece of this production is J. Smith-Cameron as Juno. The actress might be most familiar to the general public for her role as Melinda Mickens in the cable series True Blood, but she’s also an accomplished stage veteran with two Obie Awards to her credit. 

Here, she must modulate from reproof to rejoicing to resignation as Juno, bringing equal authority to moments of sorrow as much as to one of the devastating one-liners she launches at her no-good spouse (“You’d do far more work with a knife an’ fork than you’ll ever do with a shovel!”). 

This show was the veteran actress's debut with the Irish Repertory, and I fervently hope that she will appear again, and soon.

Those of Irish descent, all too familiar with their country’s centuries of woe, will identify the most with the characters here. 

But O’Casey’s themes are universal, particularly in his piercing cry against nationalist violence. 

“Good God, haven’t I done enough for Ireland?” young, maimed Johnny cries out when paid a visit by a sinister “Irregular Mobilizer” in the Irish Republican Army.  

“Boyle,” the man tells him sternly, “no man can do enough for Ireland!” 

Substitute “Russia,” “China,” “Cuba,” “Iran,” and almost any other country marked by revolutionary chaos in the 90 years since this play’s premiere, and virtually any citizen of that country would shudder in recognition.

The wonder is not a nation came into being in the Emerald Isle after so much suffering, but that, unlike the other countries I named, it continued as a stable (albeit economically stagnant) republic ever since then.

Theater Review: “Take Me Along”

As I mentioned in a prior post, I have almost never been disappointed by any production of New York’s Irish Repertory Theatre. Such was the case again when I attended a Sunday matinee in late March of their revival of the 1959 musical Take Me Along. (That particular production was taped for a Japanese documentary by someone associated with the show.)

This piece of Americana has never seemed at home on Broadway. The year it premiered, the show—starring Walter Pidgeon, Una Merkel, Jackie Gleason, and a very young Robert Morse—ran up against two other musical comedies that quickly turned into powerhouses: The Sound of Music and Gypsy. At the time, critics also carped that the cast member with true marquee value, Gleason, had had an essentially subsidiary role swollen to match his box-office appeal. Despite several Tony nominations, the show ran for only 448 performances. Twenty-six years later, the Broadway environment was still not propitious for the musical, which closed after only seven previews and one performance at the Martin Beck Theater.

The intimate nature of the The Irish Repertory Theatre lends itself far more to the show than a cavernous Broadway theater. I imagine that the musical required an entire orchestra when it premiered nearly a half century ago, but it got by very nicely this time with just three musicians, playing bass, banjo, guitar, and woodwinds. Perhaps Charlotte Moore and Ciaran O’Reilly, the longtime creative forces behind the Irish Repertory, reduced the cast size somewhat, but it’s impossible to tell here.

Why was this show, with music and lyrics by Bob Merrill and book by Joseph Stein and Robert Russell, playing at the Irish Repertory? The answer lies in its original source material: Ah, Wilderness!, the only comedy ever written by Eugene O’Neill.

Great tragedians, it appears, continually feel the need to take a break from their morose treatment of their obsessions. Tennessee Williams did so with Period of Adjustment; so did Ingmar Bergman, with his film Smiles of a Summer Night (the inspiration, of course, for Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music). Both titles could just as easily apply to O’Neill’s coming-of-age story.

An, Wilderness! (1933) represents O’Neill on a holiday—and as if to underscore the point, the play itself is set on the Fourth of July, in a place called “Centerville, Connecticut” (perhaps better thought of as Anytown, USA). From Long Day’s Journey Into Night and A Moon for the Misbegotten, we know all too much about his own troubled family not to notice the shadows hanging over this play—notably, the specters of substance abuse and guilt over illicit sex. For just this once, however, the playwright preferred to look back not in anger or sorrow but in wry amusement at the ways of youth and appreciation for the wisdom of the middle-aged.

The Miller family, the unit at the center of Ah, Wilderness! and Take Me Along, came to O’Neill “in a dream,” he remembered. Theirs is a sunny house, presided over by wise paterfamilias Nat, the editor of the town newspaper, and his sweetly understanding wife Essie. Richard, the middle brother of three sons, is a comic stand-in for the adolescent O’Neill, whose real-life initiation into sex and Nietzsche was far more tortured than the misadventures pictured here. This is, of course, O’Neill’s exercise in wish fulfillment, and given his myriad tragedies and miseries, who can deny him a laugh or two?

Set in 1906, Ah, Wilderness! corresponded with O’Neill’s adolescence. For Take Me Along, the date was moved back 14 years, for no discernible reason. Post-World War I America was a far more turbulent place than what was depicted here. (It is also glaringly incongruous for a play in which alcohol is featured so prominently to take place in a year when Prohibition was enforced more stringently than it ever would be again.) Probably like most of those in attendance, I simply ignored the implications of the musical’s dating and soaked up the sunny atmosphere.

And bright pastels set the tone of the otherwise comparatively minimally decorated set. The musical began with Centerville gathering for the dedication of a fire engine, and before long it celebrated the joys of a more innocent time, when people strolled around on a summer’s day with parasols, straw hats and white shoes. You half expected a barbershop quartet to appear at any time

O’Neill also has some sly fun with the mores of this pre-Freudian age, when sexual secrets, more likely than not, were mistakenly communicated. (Oscar Wilde was “guilty of bigamy,” Richard Miller is told by his older brother Art, who has reliably heard this at Yale.) It might be hard for jaded people such as ourselves to credit this, but despite the hormones of adolescence (raging as hotly then as now), begging for a kiss was about as far as a teenaged boy could get with the average girl then.

The comic style of O’Neill didn’t employ the snappy one-liners perfected by Neil Simon, nor does the Stein-Russell book here. Don’t expect the slapstick of a Feydeau bedroom farce, or a sophisticated drawing-room comedy. Rather, it’s, as O’Neill subtitled it, “a comedy of recollection” of an adult looking back on the way he was, marveling how he could have been so idealistic—or so naïve.

The major conflict Richard Miller faces is between the world of his books—Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde, and the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam—and the reality of love. He thinks he’s all wised-up from reading his literary rebels, but doesn’t begin to understand what depravity really is until, after setbacks with the 15-year-old object of his eye, Emily, he ends up in “Pleasant Beach House,” a nearby whorehouse. But in this pre-Cabaret musical, even this isn’t as louche as it sounds—young Richard is not in any condition to do much of anything, and he’s not even particularly interested in the house of ill repute.

The darkest elements of the play relate to something O’Neill knew only too well—alcoholism. Essie’s brother Sid has breezed into the Millers’ home from Waterbury, where he’s lost his job on a local paper because of his drinking. Everybody’s hail-fellow-well-met, a softened version of traveling salesman Hickey in The Iceman Cometh, he announces that he’s been sober “for three weeks—or almost three weeks.”

In the role of Sid, it’s doubtful that Don Stephenson consumed anywhere near the amount of oxygen that Jackie Gleason appears to have done in the original show. But, with his rangy frame, he makes it very easy to see why people considered the character “a card” and smiled at his antics, even though it’s almost impossible for anyone to imagine that at this point this chronic ne’er-do-well can turn his life around.

Teddy Eck was amusing and William Parry endearing as the intellectual Richard and his father (so wise and kind that he would make Jim Anderson, Ward Cleaver and Cliff Huxtable look like ogres).

But Beth Fowler was probably the most compelling cast member with her poignant turn as Lily, the middle-aged woman who broke off her romance with Sid years ago because of his drinking. Her voice was lovely and haunting, hovering on the thin love between disillusion and the desperate hope that maybe this time, things would be better between her and her old love. (Showing how much the passage of time can change people’s perception, a fellow audience member told me after the show, “I wanted to yell at her, ‘Run away—run away from him as fast as you can, and keep going!”)

For just this once, O’Neill allowed one of those “pipe dreams” his plays continually depicted as impossible as they were inevitable. Coming at the end of mid-century America, before Pax Americana fractured at home and abroad, the Stein-Russell-Merrill musical adaptation– and this Irish Repertory Theatre revival of it—captured all the charm of his sweet nostalgic dream.

Theater Review: "The Devil's Disciple," by George Bernard Shaw

I've seen roughly half a dozen productions at the Irish Repertory Theater in New York City, and on only one occasion have I ever felt even the slightest regret at having done so.

The company—the only one in New York dedicated solely to mounting the work of Irish- and Irish-American dramatists—recently ended another marvelous production, The Devil's Disciple, by George Bernard Shaw.

For those unfamiliar with this play set in the American Revolution, it concerns Dick Dudgeon, regarded as a reprobate within his family and community for his freethinking ways; the local minister, Anthony Anderson; and Anderson’s considerably younger wife and pretty Judith.

While the minister is away from home, British troops mistake Dudgeon for Anderson, seizing him in the hope that executing the most respected member of the community will frighten the Americans. A secret patriot, the self-proclaimed “devil’s disciple” goes along with the charade to save a belief system he can finally cherish.

Mastering the Melodrama

The play is one of the more unusual ones in the vast Shaw corpus: not just the only one set in America, but his attempt to try an old dramatic form whose use he seriously questioned: the melodrama.

"This thing, with its sobbings & speeches & declamations, may possibly be the most monstrous piece of farcical absurdity that ever made an audience shriek with laughter," the playwright wrote actress Ellen Terry as he struggled to wrestle it to form.

Shaw needn’t have worried. The 1897 American production of the play marked a turning point for Shaw, finally putting him in comfortable circumstances. He earned ₤2,000, or ₤100,000 in 1997 money, from a Midwest tour of the play, according to Michael Holroyd’s Bernard Shaw: The One-Volume Definitive Edition.

So irrepressible was Shaw’s wit and delight in intellectual provocation that one barely notices the hairbreadth escapes, the love triangle, and other conventions of the melodrama genre.

In a way, the need to stick to form might have curtailed Shaw’s natural tendency toward garrulousness, which, at its worst, sorely tries the patience of modern audiences. The whole thing, at least in the Irish Rep production, clocked in at a little less than 2 hours.(Compare it with John Bull's Other Island, written only seven years later in Shaw's long career, which can last up to 3 ½ hours.)

Director Tony Walton (who is, incidentally, the ex of Julie Andrews) also kept a tight rein on the proceedings, reducing the more than 100 actors from its original 1897 production to only a half dozen here—with, as far as I can see, no detriment to the play.

At the same time, Walton knows how to milk a scene for all it's worth, notably in the Act II sexual tension between the ironically eponymous title character and the prim Judith. While Dudgeon whistles "Yankee Doodle,” she pours two cups of tea, with agonizing slowness.

What enables the play to rise above its melodramatic origins is Shaw’s delight in paradox. Dick, the widely loathed black sheep of the family, commits himself to a Christlike martyrdom to save the patriot cause and another human being. The wellspring of his action is deeper and more generous than the intolerance practiced by his pious mother, whom he has come to despise. "I have been brought up standing by the law of my own nature,” Dick tells a tearful Judith (who has, to his distress, fallen in love with him), “and I may not go against it, gallows or no gallows."

Lorenzo Pisoni, who played Dick Dudgeon, looked, with his dark hair and errant forelock, like a younger Hugh Grant, and was especially good in his entrance scene, tossing his leather coat into the corner of the family home as he whirled on one horrified family member or friend after another. He has an effective foil in Robert Sedgwick as Rev. Anderson, the man who trades Bible for sword, rallying the rebel troops against the British. In Shaw’s dramatic formulation, the moment of decision reveals men’s true characters.

“History, sir, will tell lies, as usual”

The center of the play swings in its latter half to John Windsor-Cunningham, playing with droll verve the witty playwright-turned general “Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne. A key scene occurs when Burgoyne receives the news that General Howe will not join forces with him because of a snafu in the London war office, and he is forced to confront the unthinkable for a British army facing a ragtag bunch of colonials: defeat. “What will history say?” his fatuous Maj. Swindon asks him. Burgoyne answers, in a reply echoing down the years: “History, sir, will tell lies, as usual.”

Shaw’s scene was evidently based on historian G.M. Trevelyan’s exoneration of Burgoyne, which in turn took the general’s word for it. In a film script for a proposed 1933 version of the play, Shaw even added a scene in which Lord George German failed to send Howe instructions to link with Burgoyne because Germain's carriage horses are waiting.

Modern accounts are not as accepting of this version of events. In Iron Tears: America’s Battle for Freedom, Britain’s Quagmire: 1775-1783, the fine historian Stanley Weintraub makes plain that Howe received instructions from Lord George Germain, the minister in charge of the war effort, in May 1777, giving him plenty of time to move--then proceeded to blithely ignore the message.

(I also learned from Weintraub that Burgoyne, in addition to serving as an MP and writing plays, also served as commander in chief of British forces in Ireland from 1782 to 1783—exchanging one trying colonial tour of duty for another. Moreover, Americans of a certain age who have grown addicted to televised hearings of congressional committees investigating the conduct of America’s foreign wars might be interested to know that in the Revolutionary War, Britain’s Parliament held sessions that were every bit as partisan and acrimonious—and Burgoyne was a key participant in these.)

As with Arms and the Man, Shaw is most interested in taking down what Burgoyne bemoans in the play as "Jobbery and snobbery, incompetence and red tape." In the preface to John Bull's Other Island, Shaw contrasted the faux-romantic Lord Nelson with the grittily realistic Duke of Wellington, much to the latter's advantage.

Windsor-Cunningham’s genial scene-stealing should come as no surprise to fans of the 1959 film adaptation by Guy Hamilton (who was about to achieve greater fame in a few years for helming one of the best of the entire James Bond series, Goldfinger). The marquee names in this version for American audiences were co-stars and friendly rivals Kirk Douglas (playing Dudgeon) and Burt Lancaster (Anderson). But the one who walks off with the acting honors is Laurence Olivier, at close to mid-career peak, as Burgoyne. (I own, but have not yet seen, a BBC production with Patrick Stewart as Anderson and Ian Richardson as “Gentleman Johnny.”)

My Shavian leanings

"Are you a Shavian?" my Columbia friend Steve inquired not long ago.

I thought about it for only a few seconds, rapidly considering all the objective evidence—my zipping through more than a dozen Shaw plays when I was in the seventh and eighth grades (it would take me years before I really understood them); shelling out hundreds of dollars over the last 20 years for Shaw performances (sometimes different performances of the same play); paying for a deluxe DVD set of BBC performances of his works; even visiting (once) the Shaw Festival in Canada.

"Yes," I replied to Steve.

I understand the objections that some have to Shaw, including friends of mine with more literary talent and discerning critical judgment. [Internal editor: "Can you give me their names? I may want a…" (clearing throat) "…guest columnist whenever you take a break."]

I know that Shaw was a bit of an odd duck in his personal relations, and, for all his gifts, not just wrong but tragically, murderously wrong about the glorious possibilities of eugenics, Marxism in the Soviet style, and even Mussolini's brand of fascism.

But among modern playwrights, in my estimation, Shaw may be surpassed only by Chekhov. He makes us use our brains as well as our lungs, for mighty guffaws. Our physical and mental health are both the better for the effort.