Kudos as usual to Playwrights Horizons for taking risks on another new play written by someone who’s not a straight white male. Robert O’Hara’s Bootcandy, produced last season in Philadelphia by the Wilma Theatre, follows in the tradition of George C. Wolfe’s The Colored Museum (1986) as a satirical, revue-format commentary on African American mores and community, this time from the resolute and ribald perspective of a young gay man.
Sutter as a child, with his Mom, surrounded by posters of Michael Jackson
O’Hara places each scene—presented in lively detail by set designer Clint Ramos—in an ideologically rich and redolent social structure. In the first, O’Hara’s stand-in, Sutter (Phillip James Brannon), is instructed by his mother (Jessica Frances Dukes) in the appropriate ways to talk about sexual parts and activities. Blow-job? Look it up in the dictionary, she tells her guileless young son. Your privates? We call them “booty candy.” Why? Because I’m the mother and I said so. This funny scene of parental reluctance to respond honestly to innocent childish questions sets the pattern, as Sutter’s family refuses to look straight on (as it were) at his evolving gay identity.
As the turntable on Playwrights’ small stage revolves, O’Hara offers a closeted preacher responding to an anonymous letter from congregants decrying the effeminate behavior of several choir members. As he rails against such narrow judgments, Reverend Benson (Lance Coadie Williams) becomes more flamboyant in his own gender performance, eventually ditching his priestly robes for red high heels, a gold lame gown, and a flouncy white wig.
The reverend, preaching, before his big reveal
Other such broad impersonations follow in quick succession. Four neighbors gossip on the phone about a woman who intends to name her child “Genitalia.” The scene is accomplished by two actresses in a Charles Ludlam-esque double-portrait, in which each performer’s costume, make-up, and wig is split down the middle of her body, so that she appears to be the other character when she turns her opposite side to the audience.
In another, a condescending, ill-informed white moderator solicits opinions from black playwrights on a panel discussion about their work. Several scenes take place at a gay bar, where closeted white men cruise queer black men. In another scene, on a romantic beach, the now adult Genitalia and her female partner, Intifada, perform a “non-commitment” ceremony to end their relationship.
Genitalia and Intifada’s non-commitment ceremony
All of these scenes are amusing, sometimes even outrageously so, in refreshing, theatrically unfettered and socially critical ways. But in addition to writing the play, O’Hara directs this production, which lets an outside eye go missing. Most of the vignettes—each announced by a supertitle written over the stage—last about a third too long. Each funny idea runs successively out of steam. Pruning and shaping would enhance their theatrical and critical zing.
Sutter and his brother-in-law in a gay bar
The gay bar scenes are inexplicably mean-spirited. In one, Sutter’s closeted white brother-in-law comes on to him and they exchange graphic plans for their sexual encounters. In another, a closeted white gay man approaches Sutter and his drag-dressed friend, Larry, asking them to sexually humiliate him. It’s unclear why Sutter trucks with these people, although O’Hara intimates that he enjoys having power over them. But the stakes in those scenes are murky, and dramaturgically, they don’t quite fit the rest of the narrative. Likewise, Genitalia and Intifada’s divorce ceremony is baggy and tossed-off, the laughs misbegotten and fleeting.
A white man looks for sexual humiliation from Sutter and his friend, Larry
The characters (and the performers who play them) recur across scenes in ways that knit Sutter’s childhood and adult life together nicely, but the pleasure of those connections comes mostly from the virtuosic actors. Brannon plays Sutter at various ages with heart, elegance, and good humor. Williams brings a tour-de-force of gender performativity, playing Sutter’s gruff, hetero-enforcing stepfather as convincingly as he plays Sutter’s feminine gay friend Larry, the closeted preacher, and Sutter’s elderly grandmother. Dukes and Benja Kay Thomas, who plays Sutter’s mother later in her life and performs as the unfortunate butch, Genitalia, are also terrific across their multiple roles, demonstrating hilarious and instructive ways to perform race and gender.
Sutter and his family in their kitchen
Bootycandy has the potential to sit alongside The Colored Museum and early work by Pomo Afro Homos—the African American gay male collective of the 1990s that produced similarly satirical, politically poignant performance—in the annals of successful race, gender, and sexuality parodies. The self-reflexive meta-commentary O’Hara threads throughout implies that he wants to implicate the audience. For instance, the pompous white moderator leads the panel discussion on the stage apron, under a projection that says “Playwrights Horizons.” And several times, the characters/actors leave the stage with their eyebrows raised and their eyes cut at the audience, as if to say, “Don’t think you’re immune from this criticism, folks.” But those moments now seem more confusing than challenging.
The play needs dramaturgical work to shape it into a more incisive, confrontational piece. I’ll look forward to its future iterations, as Bootycandy has lots of potential as a funny, sharp social critique.
The Feminist Spectator
Bootycandy, written and directed by Robert O’Hara, Playwrights Horizons, through October 12, 2014.
I recently finished Kelly Cogswell’s terrific memoir of lesbian feminist activism, Eating Fire, in which she narrates the history of the Lesbian Avengers. The group was founded by, among others, Sarah Schulman and Ana Simo (Cogswell’s longtime partner), in the early 1990s, as a “direct-action group focused on issues vital to lesbian survival and visibility” (p. 9). The history of LGBT activism in the ‘90s is often told through ACT UP and Queer Nation, which makes Cogswell’s story of this lesbian-specific group particularly important and compelling.
Setting the stage for her story, Cogswell rehearses the incestuous dynamics of lesbian friendship circles, and the ways lovers and friends inevitably became collaborators in the political work that so many held dear. Actions and issues overlapped. The Avengers included women from the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization, who demonstrated against the exclusion of queers from the St. Patrick’s Day March in Manhattan. Some of the Avengers had also worked for the establishment of the Rainbow Curriculum, developed by the New York City Board of Education in a moment of forward-thinking, inclusive policy. The lesbian feminists who comprised the Avengers also called attention to ubiquitous hate crimes against gays and lesbians, such as the harassment and eventual murder of Brian Mock (a white, gay, disabled man) and Hattie Mae Cohens (an African-American lesbian) by skinheads in Salem, Oregon.
Cogswell offers a thick description of the U.S. political moment at the time, and also describes the growth of the “official” LGBT movement in the ‘90s, which mostly abandoned radical street activism to work through existing political and social channels. Although she doesn’t write a lot about ACT UP as the activist exemplar of the moment, and doesn’t dwell on the formation of, for only one example, the Human Rights Campaign, the similarities and differences between the lesbian direct action the Avengers represented and these other groups and organizations is clear. She recalls Simo telling her how “before she helped start the Avengers she walked around like a ticking bomb, sick of being invisible, of how dykes blabbed in conference rooms while fags took to the streets” (p. 102).
Kelly Cogswell
Cogswell spent some time as a graduate student in Performance Studies at New York University, working briefly for Women & Performance Journal, until it became clear the department’s orientation was too academic to accommodate the radical artistic and political commitments of a dyke like her. She recalls the pre-gentrification East Village when it “really did seem like a small town, and my dyke friends lived just around the corner, dragging their politics and art into the street” (p.6), and the excitement and agony of figuring out where you fit in and where you stood out around the complexities of “belonging” across differences of ethnicity, race, and class, as well as sexuality.
Cogswell’s writing is astute and vital. She recalls the events she describes in compelling detail, yet avoids the self-congratulatory accounting that sometimes mars memoirs like these. Instead, she sorts out the good and the bad, always considering how difficult it was for political action groups to do everything “right” by one another as they tried to change a society that barely acknowledged them at all. Cogswell’s memoir is full of honest ambivalence about how the Avengers operated, what their work meant, and the effect it had on the politics of its day and on generations of future feminist and LGBTQ activists.
Eating Fire appears in tandem with other histories of LGBTQ activism. Director David France’s documentary How to Survive a Plague (2012) was positively reviewed and much discussed, and Sarah Schulman and Jim Hubbard’s documentary, United in Anger: A History of Act Up (2012), also circulated recently. Reading Cogswell’s book, with its emphasis on lesbian activism, reminds me of the grassroots action campaigns in addition to ACT UP that were so much a part of feminist and LGBT and queer organizing in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. While the kinds of street activism for which the Avengers were known continues to happen globally, the direct, embodied action the Avengers employed has been largely replaced by Internet petitions circulated by change.org and other groups, and by Kickstarter and GoFundMe campaigns for various causes.
The world has changed since the era Cogswell remembers here, but perhaps not in the ways the Avengers hoped. They weren’t, after all, campaigning for same-sex marriage; they were attacking the media, corporations, and politicians for their bigotry, their racism, their sexism, and their homophobia, advancing an intersectional analysis that underlined the necessity for structural change. Cogswell remembers with pride when actions attracted crowds or media attention, or when the people who turned up for organizing meetings actually put their bodies on the line and appeared on the streets. She also remembers the interpersonal and ideological divides among the Avengers’ activists, along with the internal squabbling and chastisements that often made it difficult to commit to their common work. And she writes thoughtfully about how the Avengers fractured over racism, bisexuality, and what often felt like competing claims for ideological or identitarian primacy on a micro level while American society continued business as usual on the macro.
Cogswell writes with clarity about this complicated political, feminist, lesbian history. She uses “lesbian feminist” unapologetically here, as the Lesbian Avengers and so many other activist groups and individuals did at the time. I miss standing under the banner of that identity. “Lesbian feminist” has fallen out of vogue on university campuses and in activist communities, as criticisms or hesitations about the meaning of “feminism” make it an often overlooked locution, and as some find “lesbian” too confining and specifically female, when “trans*” or “genderqueer” allows a more capacious performance of identity and set of political commitments.
A history of lesbian feminist activism
Reading Eating Fire reminds me that those of us who came of age in the mid-‘70s to ‘80s as proud lesbian feminists held politics that were often inchoate, but full of righteous anger and keen intellectual understandings of interlocking oppression. The concept of intersectionality that’s recently been re-popularized in LGBT, queer, feminist, and gender and sexuality studies was first theorized by Kimberle Crenshaw and Teresa de Lauretis—in different forms and venues—in the ‘80s.
Cogswell’s narrative demonstrates the difficulties of truly working intersectionally. Ana Simo, her partner then and now, is a Cuban lesbian, and as a white working-class woman from Kentucky, Cogswell often found herself in political contexts in which she or Simo were singular in terms of race or class. As her stories demonstrate, it wasn’t easy to form coalitions across multiple identity vectors, or to juggle the competing claims of identities that crisscrossed your own skin.
Jennifer Miller, of Circus Amok, with fire wands
The book’s title, Eating Fire, comes from the group’s signature act, when Lesbian Avengers at actions lit wands of fire that they extinguished in their mouths. The idea was suggested by dancer/choreographer Jennifer Monson, who had friends in alternative circuses like Circus Amok, which Jennifer Miller (the “bearded lady”), directed. Miller showed them how to dunk a bit of rag wrapped around a coat hanger in lighter fluid or kerosene, then “tilt your head back so the approaching flame doesn’t burn off your nose or hair and insert it into your mouth as you exhale slightly. Close your lips, it’s extinguished. Make a mistake and inhale—your lungs explode and you die” (p. 22). Cogswell’s description of what would happen if they performed this fire-eating wrong underlines the real as well as the metaphorical risks these women took to make themselves visible in public political discourse.
As I read, I wondered what my students in gender and sexuality studies would have to say about Cogswell’s experiences. In a feminism and popular culture course I taught a couple of years ago, I asked students how many of them had ever been to a political demonstration or a protest march. One or two raised their hands. But our subsequent class conversation made me wonder whether marching and demonstrating remains the best way to agitate for political change, whether gathering masses of bodies in one place at one time is a gesture whose moment has passed. Marching and demonstrating was the sine qua non of my own generation’s activism, but perhaps not for my students’.
I wonder, though, without those gestures, how we feel ourselves part of a movement for social change. How does political activism in social media change the experience of being there, and feeling yourself part of a collection of people who hold the same beliefs? How do we feel and see righteous political anger differently online than in real time and space? Or am I just romanticizing presence and face-to-face interaction?
My first political march was in 1979, when I drove in a truck with my housemates from Boston to Washington to participate in the national march for lesbian and gay rights. We took turns riding in the truck bed (which happily, had a cap, since it was October and already cold), and when we arrived in DC, we parked and walked, joining those crowds of happy, brave demonstrators determined to make ourselves seen and heard. We didn’t know what we were doing; we just joined the throngs of people on DC’s streets and on the Mall, and moved together toward the rally. Visibility had costs; I wasn’t yet out to my parents, and froze every time I saw a news camera pointed in my direction. The stakes of our presence felt high, but seeing one another as a mass of strangers with whom we tacitly had something in common was one of the most powerful experiences of my life.
Praxis Axis demonstration, May 2014, in front of Princeton’s Frist Student Union
I want my students to feel those transformative emotions, but at the same time, I realize they might find their affective and political pleasures elsewhere. Last year, on Princeton’s campus, students from sociologist Tey Meadow’s course, “Queer Citizenship: Merging Theory and Activism,” sponsored by our Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, staged a demonstration as a group they called Praxis Axis, in which they sat on the steps of the student union (the Frist student union, at that), wearing masks and holding themselves silent as a loop of their demands and university administrators’ responses to sexual assault and mental health policies on campus played on tape. Another group, also inspired by a class, this one in art-making and graphic display called “Art as Interaction,” put up a three-fold white wall in a similar campus location, inviting people to write down their thoughts, experiences, and observations, especially about things that trouble them. The action was called “What Will You Bring to the Surface?” Many posted remarks were critical of campus politics; others were critical of the critics. But if nothing else, the comment wall and the masked students at Frist called public attention to embodied political discourse, activist gestures on a campus where people presume students are conservative at best or apathetic at worst (a stereotype I haven’t found true). The reclamation of public space for protest and politically critical discourse reminded me, in however small a way, of the visually-oriented and performative style of the Lesbian Avengers’ campaigns.
People milling about “The Surface” on Princeton’s campus, April 2014
In fact, I appreciate Cogswell’s sage comments about visibility. She writes,
For a while now, people have also been rolling their eyes a little at the goal of visibility. Like the idea is passé. . . . I always thought about visibility as a jumping-off place, a precondition for having a voice. Because if you aren’t visible in culture or in politics, or even on the streets, how can you demand anything or participate like a grown-up in the ongoing narrative of your country? We could disappear and who’d know we’d been gone? . . . Visibility isn’t change itself, but a kind of wedge others can follow. (p. 231)
Cogswell is refreshingly ecumenical about where and how we find visibility. She remembers she and Ana gathering at a bar to watch Ellen DeGeneres’s character Ellen Morgan come out on television in ’97. She recalls, “[W]hen the ultrafamous Oprah Winfrey, playing Ellen’s shrink, said, ‘Good for you. You’re gay,’ the whole house came down. It was like we’d finally gotten our green cards, been admitted to the Union, even if only until the next commercial break” (p. 144). At the same time, she remembers late ‘90s tragedies like the murders of James Byrd, Jr., in Jasper, TX, and Matthew Shepard, in Laramie, WY, balancing gains in popular representation with the reality of LGBT lives lost.
We need to hear more stories like Cogswell’s, to remind contemporary feminist queer, trans*, and LGBTQI people that political strategies have a genealogy, a history of successes and failures worth learning from and recalling as we retool our tactics for the future. (Cosgwell notes wryly that when she spoke about the Avengers recently, an archivist asked for her papers, which made her feel like she should “be in the Natural History Museum. . . . it was like proof I really was a fossil, a street activist in the age of the Internet” (p.230).
Cogswell’s book is fascinating, insightful, and moving, as she doesn’t hesitate to mix the personal and the political, a skill lesbian feminists always found worth honing. I have a feeling it might be worth learning again, as lesbian feminist queer trans* activists, artists, and writers continue our struggle for social justice for all.
The Feminist Spectator
Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger, by Kelly Cogswell, University of Minnesota Press, 2014. $19.95 paperback.
John Mahoney and Penny Slusher as Dan and Betty in Chapatti
Christian O’Reilly’s two-hander, Chapatti, at the Town Hall Theatre for the Galway International Arts Festival, is a valentine to the possibility of connection when it seems most remote. Dan (John Mahoney, of TV’s Frasier fame) is a man with a dog named Chapatti, who’s recently lost Martha, the love of his life, to cancer. Betty (Penny Slusher) is a cat woman, one of those singular souls who always has more animals than she needs and just loves them all. Dan wants to die, so that he can join Martha, though he admits he’s not sure where she is. Betty is full of lust for life and eventually, for Dan. Dan and Betty meet when he takes Chapatti to the vet, not because the dog is sick, but because Dan needs company, and literally bumps into Betty on his way out, upending her box of new kittens.
Betty was married to a man who didn’t love her, and because she’s feisty and self-possessed, knew enough to get out before they had children who might keep her with him. Dan’s choices were more complicated, but they, too, leave him solitary. As he sets about putting his affairs in order, preparing to commit suicide, his most pressing need is to find a home for Chapatti. And that’s when his accidental encounter with Betty begins to change his life.
John Mahoney in Chapatti
O’Reilly structures Chapatti as parallel monologues, as Dan and Betty separately tell their stories directly to the audience until gradually, their lives begin to join and they speak in dialogue. One of the pleasures of the production is seeing how they become first aware of one another, and then curious about one another, and then attracted to each other, as two lonely souls are drawn together.
Directed by BJ Jones, for a production co-produced by Chicago’s Northlight Theatre, Chapatti draws a sweet picture of two gentle people moored in disappointment and loss. Jones moves the pair about the intimate Town Hall stage in parallel tracks that finally meet. Their separate homes share a table and two chairs center stage, where they sit alone and then finally, together.
The set for Chapatti
Dan and Betty’s stories are full of rue and wistful comedy, but they never sink to a base sentimentality because Betty, in particular, is drawn with determination and insight. She might wear rust-color corduroys and a stretched-out long cardigan over a flowered shirt, but she reports on her life with ironic detail and humor.
Mahoney and Slusher are lovely as the fated couple. Betty could be played as a silly flibbertigibbet, a ditzy cat woman flitting through her lonely life. Instead, Slusher gives her backbone and a wry humor, charming the audience with her strength and zest. Toward the play’s end, as she prepares for Dan to join her for dinner, Betty changes her clothes behind a screen, putting on a dress she says she hasn’t worn in 30 years. When she reappears to assess herself approvingly in the mirror, the audience at the performance I saw actually applauded with delight.
Mahoney and Slusher, as Betty, finally wearing her red dress
At a recent talk-back, playwright O’Reilly told a story about slipping the script for Chapatti under Mahoney’s dressing room door the last time the actor was in Galway. Mahoney read it and loved it and encouraged Northlight to produce it. Dan seems written for him. His Irish accent might come and go, but Mahoney is gruff and sweet as a man whose misbegotten romance has left him isolated and sad. When Betty persuades him towards life instead of death, Mahoney’s whole bearing shifts, and the character’s gratitude and hopefulness lights up his face.
But it’s Slusher who grounds the production with her knowing sense of humor and a subtle meta-theatricality. She brings the audience along with her as she moves Dan away from that noose dangling above his room. She persuades us to engage with stories about two rather ordinary older people who deserve companionship and warmth from human beings as well as animals as they toil away at their lives. Her deft performance keeps us from condescending to her character or to the play, and charms us with her intelligence, her timing, and her command over a character who she redeems with her acting.
Slusher convinces us to go along with her and Mahoney, taking O’Reilly’s story to where we already know it will end. She nearly winks at the audience as she performs, inviting us to admire the joyous wiles of a woman who, remarkably, knows how to get what she wants. And in the meantime, we much admire Slusher, too.
The Feminist Spectator
Chapatti, by Christian O’Reilly, directed by BJ Jones, Town Hall Theatre, Galway International Arts Festival, July 20, 2014.
I’m a fan of Irish playwright Enda Walsh, whose plays Disco Pigs, The Walworth Farce, The Electric Ballroom, and Penelope represent some of the most exciting contemporary playwrighting anywhere in the world. Walsh is by no means a feminist writer, although in Disco Pigs, it’s the young woman who winds up freeing herself from the constraints of her working class Cork existence, and in The Walworth Farce, it’s the young, black supermarket clerk who stumbles on the family’s macabre ritual reenactment but saves herself at the end. And even in Once, Walsh’s musical theatre book adaptation of the Irish indie film, the female character has a kind of strength and resilience that makes her admirable.
But Walsh’s world is a masculine one, full of hyper-activity and homosociality that goes unremarked and enacted without being embraced. (The Feminist Spectator 2 [FS2], my partner Stacy Wolf, says that in a post-show talk-back here at the Galway International Arts Festival, Walsh said the play is about “masculinity under pressure.”) His is a world in which men aren’t powerful and don’t necessarily succeed, but control their worlds with a ruthlessness imagination that has dire effects on those even less powerful.
Enda Walsh
Walsh’s commitment to storytelling, to the intricacies of language, and most importantly, to ritual, is as exciting as it is in, for instance, Genet, although the ritualistic rehearsals of The Maids work to a very different purpose than in The Walworth Farce or in Walsh’s latest play, Ballyturk.
Ballyturk is the centerpiece of the 2014 Galway International Arts Festival, an event that’s long been hospitable to Walsh’s work. In 2011, I saw his equally compelling revival of his play Misterman, in which Cillian Murphy (who also stars in Ballyturk) performed the one-person play with a concentration and physical commitment I’m not sure I’d ever seen before onstage. Because I remember Murphy’s performance more clearly than I do Walsh’s text, FS2 reminded me that Misterman was about a guy who seemed weirdly young and perhaps mentally challenged, who was working out something about the church and his mother.
Cillian Murphy in Misterman, Galway Arts Festival 2011
And perhaps it turns out that he’s been killing young women for a long time; the story is rather violent and misogynist. It’s also oblique. I remember something about violence, something about living in a small town, something about the external constraints on your existence that propel you without letting you feel free, something about not regretting anything but constantly repeating some sort of personal and social wound . . . I don’t remember the what of the play so much as I remember the how of the production.
The motifs and the performance mode in Ballyturk are remarkably similar. In fact, some critics here in Galway murmur that Walsh is repeating himself. Fair enough, but he’s so without imitators, I don’t mind him rehearsing his own recurrent themes. Ballyturk is played at such a high physical and emotional pitch, and performed with such impeccable verve and zeal, it’s reductive to accuse the play or the production of being thematically or philosophically static.
Mikel Murfi as “2,” with his crisps
In any case, that’s not Walsh’s point. Mikel Murfi, the superb Irish actor who, along with Stephen Rea, stars with Cillian Murphy in Ballyturk, remarked after a performance that Walsh and the cast are less interested in generating meaning or delineating character than they are in creating an atmosphere. They want the production to have a nearly subconscious effect on the audience way beyond describing what it was about.
Still, if Ballyturk derives from Walsh’s own canon, it also refers to other absurdists. Sartre’s No Exit is here in what we soon learn is a room these two men can’t leave. Irish writer Emma Donoghue’s novel Roomis referenced, too, as it becomes clear that the world “1” and “2” (as they’re called) inhabit is the only one they’ve ever known. “1” (Cillian Murphy) listens in on conversations on the other side of their walls, using a funnel to channel the sounds of other people engaging in lives outside their tiny realm. But these people signify as little as the characters of Ballyturk, the possibly fictional town that “1” and “2” (Mikel Murfi) bring to life in their relentless rehearsal of what it might mean to be alive.
Murphy, as “1,” in his hurling helmet, followed by Murfi as “2”
Waiting for Godot also resonates here, although the iconic bowler hats are replaced by a leather 1970s hurling helmet that Murphy wears, apparently to keep “1” from hurting himself when he suffers what appear to be seizures. And Murfi sports only what the script calls a “ginger mullet” on his first appearance, when he’s revealed just beyond the stark spotlight in which Murphy delivers his initial urgent monologue. Murfi wears nothing but briefs and is covered in talcum powder; he eats a package of crisps, which he folds and shoves into his underwear when he’s done. Then he takes the dust buster he’s holding under his arm and vacuums around Murphy’s feet.
These odd images and actions set the rules for Ballyturk’s alternative reality. The beginning of “1” and “2’s” ritual’s is signaled by a cuckoo clock that launches itself aggressively from its unassuming wooden box and into the room with a loud cry. The men draw back the musty rust-colored curtain that covers the back wall to reveal “Ballyturk” written across the top in neon tubing, over a collection of line drawings of people’s faces. These, it seems, represent the town’s residents. When “2” throws a dart at the wall, the men enact the characters on whom it lands, one speaking through a microphone and the other embodying the roles.
Ballyturk and the line portraits across the back wall of the stage
They tell nonsensical stories that add up to very little. The stories also go by so quickly and are spoken so fast, it’s difficult to know if we’re supposed to make anything of them or not. As Murfi remarked after the performance I saw, by the time you grab on to what’s happened and what it might mean, the play is speeding on to the next thing. Walsh and the actors intentionally make it impossible to keep up with the play intellectually—you have to simply experience it viscerally.
But Murphy and Murfi perform the Ballyturk characters with such physical and vocal specificity that the gallery of eccentric but somehow familiar village types become charming to watch. Murfi has a putty face with a broad forehead and a protruding chin (and extensive Le Coq training) that he uses to great advantage creating utterly individual cartoon versions of these characters to amuse Murphy’s “1.”
Both actors assume the high, singsong, Irish-accented voices of Ballyturk villagers, performing in ways that are almost beyond stereotype, they’re done with such urgent speed and somehow, need. The men appear to comfort themselves with these characters; their performances are moments of self-soothing that require great investments of energy.
And of props: the big wide stage is soon littered with stuff. This room might have no exit—or finally, the only way out at which we all arrive, in the end—but its several closets and microwave keep filling inexplicably with things that fall out when their doors open. For example, when the shelf above the wardrobe opens, a large collection of odd shoes tumbles to the floor. A similar closet across the room expels fluorescent yellow shoes and other objects that scatter across the floor. Murphy finds a pair of yellow high heels that he briefly dons and then kicks high into the theatre’s flies, where they disappear.
All this is done with no commentary, but with the gusto and determination that implies these men have done it all before. Although we don’t know where this is going, they do, which lets you watch with confidence, curiosity, and not a little awe.
Murphy’s angst, against the wall
Walsh’s play requires not just suspension of disbelief, but a willingness to forego all the conventions of narrative and just be carried along by the very fast flow of the alternate universe he and his actors create. Why do “1” and “2” shower and then cover themselves in talc? Why are they surprised when a potted flower appears on their wall from nowhere? Why does “1” break all his black 45 records against the wall? How does the record player (as that’s what it is, an old-fashioned turntable) turn itself on and play music when “2” stamps his foot against the floor? Why does “1” carry around a knife, but break the rules of stage action by never using it? Is Walsh commenting on this theatrical convention, just as he seems to deconstruct so many others? Every spectator could answer these questions differently. The strange joy of Ballyturk is how Walsh and the actors leave the work of meaning-making up to each of us.
Nonetheless, in all that running across the very wide stage of Galway’s Black Box Theatre, and in all that tumult in a room that seems to have literally no exit, until its back wall ominously folds down to reveal a green hill with a man in a dark suit perched on it with his back to the audience, meaning lingers as inexorably as death. Because death, ultimately, is what Ballyturk is about. Two-thirds into this 90-minute roar of an evening, the men’s commotion comes to an abrupt stop when that wall folds down, and Stephen Rea’s rather effete, imperious “3” enters to disrupt their on-going ritual enactments. “1” and “2” pause their frantic routine to observe “3” with the fear and trembling that people experience at the appearance of angels, or devils, or messiahs. He could be all three.
Stephen Rea as “3” and Murphy as “1,” trembling
“3” demands tea, and biscuits, and finally, asks that they choose which one of them will join him on the other side of the wall. His final demand wrenches the two original men apart and breaks down their ritual. After he leaves and the wall swings back into its implacable place, “1” and “2” try to recuperate. But instead, their ritual intensifies, so that their impersonations and routines seem even more desperate and frantic.
The production flies by, so that connections and echoes become apparent on a delay. For example, I caught Murphy say the word “freedom” at one point, and then admonish himself that “we don’t use that word.” Later, when he’s imagining the world beyond the back wall, to which “3” has beckoned one of them, he pictures it full of beauty and air and, in fact, freedom, which persuades “2” that “1” should be the man to leave, even though his exit leads only toward death. In its stampede of words and action, Ballyturk addresses what language makes possible and what it constrains.
Ballyturk is full of life, of two men living now, with history fading and the future disappearing. They share only a common present. Who they are and how they got there doesn’t matter; they exist. Although they tumble over one another in continual physical proximity, their intimacy doesn’t appear sexual but something more primal. They seem oddly childlike. And in their inexplicable interconnectedness, they enact a relationship based on mutual need and even love.
It’s a pleasure to watch two talented men on stage together simply being present and connected—not competing for a woman or for power, but just somehow surviving in close relationship. “3’s” appearance highlights their connection even more, as he introduces power into the room. He lords something over them. He intimates a past by telling them they look older and saying, “Did you think I wouldn’t be back?” He presents the promise and the threat of a future. “3” says,
–to continue living—to remain upright and to be able to carry on searching for something other than what you have—some love or money or experience or cat or cake or son or anything at all—something which makes you continue without the mindfulness of it all ending at any moment—for everything is here and we are here to lay down legacy—to give life purpose by reaching its edge. (Slight pause.) And it’s time for you two and for what you’ve made—time for one of you to walk away and into your passing. In leaving you’re giving shape to life—some design and purpose for being what you are—for this is the order that all life demands—(Slight pause.) it needs a death.
Rea sings into a microphone that drops inexplicably from the flies
Ballyturk is about death, but it’s also about language and what it tells us, what it can describe and what it can’t, and about how the body, too, is necessary for making meaning even as it fails and limits us. (Rea’s character, “3,” has a wonderful monologue about his hands, in which he anthropomorphizes them in relation to cigarettes.)
The play is familiar but surprising (especially when that back wall falls so late in the play and with an unexpected entrance at the end). It’s also quite moving, as it gestures toward how we build our lives together. What’s the difference between these characters’ routine and mine—sleeping, showering, telling stories, feeding myself and others, doing things that I think might have meaning, all regulated by time as impervious as the cuckoo clock that pops out from the wall of “1” and “2’s” room?
The only living thing that invades the hermetic space of Ballyturk is a large fly, which sound designer Helen Atkinson evokes with eerie perfection. It moves precisely around the room, as “1” tries frantically to catch the fly and save it. (He puts it in the cuckoo clock, from which it’s bound to reappear.) The sentience of another life, one that can’t be controlled by routine, is the only thing that disturbs the rigid surface of the stuffy room in which “1” and “2” play out their rituals.
Room 303 press image
Another fly punctuates Room 303, a 13-minute audio monologue Walsh wrote that seems a companion piece to Ballyturk. Four or five spectators listen at a time, in a room within an art gallery constructed for the occasion. The monologue (voiced by Niall Buggy) tells us we’ve gathered in a down-at-the-heels hotel room where the elderly man we hear speaking has come to die. My three fellow spectators and I perched uneasily on the few chairs placed around the room. One of us was brave enough to sit on the edge of the bed, where the man, were he physically present, would be lying. Instead, we hear his disembodied voice, describing his weariness with a life spent traveling and visiting and sharing tea and biscuits, only to arrive at the end of his road in this blank room. The only action occurs when the man reports that a fat fly lands at the bottom of the bed and crawls up his leg.
Room 303 is quiet where Ballyturk is loud, and still where the other production is frenetic, and contained where the play is out of control. Niall Buggy’s voice, playing the man on the tape, describes his resignation about reaching the moment when there will be no more rituals and no more repetitions. The hotel room is sterile, impersonal, and nearly empty. In Ballyturk, the room is idiosyncratic and personal, chock full of things that may or may not mean something.
Murphy, Ballyturk
They go well together, these two Walsh plays—one epic and somehow insightful, the other intimate and poignant. And the Galway International Arts Festival loves Walsh enough to do them both at once.
The Feminist Spectator
Ballyturk, the Black Box Theatre, Galway International Arts Festival, July 17, 2014. Room 303, the Art Gallery Hub, Galway International Arts Festival, July 17, 2014.
This beautiful adaptation of Joseph O’Connor’s 2004 novel was devised by Moonfish Theatre, a Galway-based company. Using a bare stage flanked on two sides by a variety of sound-making devices and visual projection technologies, the six actors move in and out of character roles, as well as singing, playing music, and managing the images and sounds that enhance the narrative.
O’Connor’s Star of the Sea is a sprawling novel about a famine ship crossing from Ireland to America in 1847. Numerous character arcs interweave and collide, as O’Connor evokes not just the horrors of an Atlantic crossing but also the backstories of the passengers who embark from different social and economic circumstances. The ravages of Ireland’s Great Famine haunt them all, but its effects on their lives play out differently depending on their stations, with devastating consequences for them all.
Ionia Ni Chroinin as Mary Duane
Moonfish elects to focus on just several of O’Connor’s many tales: Mary Duane is a young woman whose life links many of the stories told. As a girl, she and the boy who becomes her master, Lord Merridith, maintain a warm friendship that evolves into love. But as Merridith assumes his power and privilege, he’s required to change his affections for his friend into the control of a master over a servant, which he does with ruthless self-concern. The evil Pius Mulvey later impregnates Mary, then leaves her to become a criminal in England before he makes his sorry way to the ship. Pius’s good brother, Nicholas, stays behind raising Pius’s child with Mary, after Mary sets sail for America with the ruined Lord Merridith, in whose employ she’s now imprisoned. And Lord Merridith’s wife marries the landowner because a woman of her class must.
In Moonfish’s treatment, these individual stories matter less than how their theatricalizing makes them a tapestry of collective historical experience. For instance, Nicholas describes people in Connemara dying from hunger; the scene ends with him jumping from a cliff with his baby in his arms to ensure a quick and less painful death than they’d suffer from starvation. Although the moment is wrenching and beautifully, it’s only part of the whole story’s fabric and momentum. Nicholas’s death sits beside Mary’s humiliation, when she’s assaulted sexually on the ship by Lord Merridith, the man she once loved, since their class differences make their relationship impossible but don’t quench his desire for her. Mary’s assault echoes against the image of Lord Merridith refusing to hear Nicholas’s plea on behalf of the tenants to save them from death. Merridith’s minion insists the man is busy playing cards; we see his silhouette on a screen, his head thrown back in laughter while his people die.
Morgan Cooke, in front of the writing on the sail that translates the Irish dialogue.
Star of the Sea is performed in Irish and English, though O’Connor’s novel is only in English. The bilingual production helps non-Irish speakers understand the Irish dialogue by translating snippets in real time. One of the performers stands at a laptop stage left, looking into the scene throughout the production. You gradually realize that she’s writing the English words we see projected on a sepia-toned screen meant to resemble a torn sail. Her handwriting—in two different evocative old-fashioned fonts—tracks the Star of the Sea’s progress toward New York, as well as providing bits of translation written in the third-person while the character talks. Without using obvious and distracting supertitles, the translation becomes part of the means through which the whole production narrates its tale.
In fact, Irish and English are only two of the many languages Moonfish uses here. Theatricality becomes its own multiple languages, as visual and sound effects, singing and music underscore and push the narrative forward in their own way. The performers’ bodies become part of this theatrical speech, each performing several roles, often across gender. The cross-gender performance is done simply and lucidly, with costume changes that signal a switch in role and gender and not much else. The lovely, underplayed gender performances resonate more poignantly than more emphatic gender play might have.
The six performers also move the transparencies across the overhead projector to evoke the multitudes on the famine ship, work the sound effects to hint at the wind and the waves, play a violin or mandolin to punctuate the action, and sing a traditional Irish ballad or two to move the story and enhance the mood.
These choices help Moonfish evoke a sense of community and country, rather than only individual lives. Ideas and emotions become embodied not in a psychologically singular way, but through images and feelings that are created collectively on stage as we watch. Actors leave the playing space to change a piece of costuming directly off-stage; no curtains separate the wings from the central space or hide the preparatory action from the audience. Seeing the performers make their transitions and move from one task to the next only enhances the magic of what they create. We see the theatrical apparatus at work at the same time that we’re captivated by what it produces.
Ionia and Mairead Ni Chroinin, of Moonfish Theatre
Letting the seams of the theatre show was once labelled Brechtian, and was often used for political purposes, to point to ideology and to underline how power works. In Moonfish’s hands, seeing the means of production at work also has a political valence; the production leaves you with the horror of British political and social neglect that allowed so many to die during the famine. But although we learn from the story, Star of the Sea and its collective of artists also gesture toward the politics of performance as well as the politics of representation. The six consummate performers—Ionia and Máiréad Ní Chróinín, the sisters who created Moonfish, along with Morgan Cooke, Grace Kiely, Zita Monahan, and Simon Boyle—tell the story together, and the program notes say that “the ensemble directs each other. This gives every member of the company faith in and ownership of the production.”
That mutual commitment shows in every line the performers say, in every gesture they make, and in every image Star of the Sea offers its audience. The production adapts the novel with glorious theatricality, honoring a story told in one form with the specific craft of another, and with all the heart and soul of artists who care about a nation’s history and its future.
