SHANLEY’S ROOTS PLAY A COMIC IRISH STEW
I always thought John Patrick Shanley was Italian. I knew he was from the Bronx, where I also grew up. But his screenplay for Moonstruck and his stage plays Danny and the Deep Blue Sea and Italian-American Reconciliation feel so deeply rooted in New York’s Italian-American culture that it just seemed obvious.
I never thought about his name (duh!) until seeing Outside Mullingar. Shanley, of course, is Irish-American. Outside Mullingar is his roots play, a journey of memory and imagination to a farm in rural Ireland like the one where his father lived as a boy.
It’s also deliciously funny, a twisted comedy about death and love that flirts with — and sometimes embraces — Irish clichés galore. Angela Konrad’s Pacific Theatre production oozes with charm and shines with four fine performances.
The play is set in a modest kitchen that stands for the sideby-side farms of the Rileys and Muldoons. Anthony Riley (John Emmet Tracy) lives with his widowed father Tony (the ever-solid Ron Reed), and Rosemary Muldoon (Rebecca deBoer) with her recently widowed mother Aoife (dryly hilarious Erla Faye Forsyth).
The opening scene, at a funeral, offers gallows humour in the gift-for-gab style for which the Irish are famous. Describing how a premature baby seemed to get even smaller before he died, Tony tells Anthony, “He shrunk like a sock in the wash.”
There will be more deaths before long, arguments about inheritance (Tony threatens not to leave his farm to Anthony but sell it instead to his brother’s son, who looks more like a farmer: “He has hands like feet.”) and a long-simmering property dispute between the Rileys and Muldoons that provides a productive running gag.
The second act love story belongs to Rosemary and Anthony, now living alone on their neighbouring farms. She’s 30-something, he’s in his 40s. Both are single, adrift (“Seize the day? Seize it and do what, though?”), and depressed (“Thinking’s worse than February.”). The mystery is why they haven’t got together.
Rosemary calls him “a bit of a lump” and scolds him for his lack of spunk and spark, but it’s obvious she cares for him. And what’s up with Anthony? She’s beautiful, available and right next door, but he seems uninterested.
The gloriously funny catechism with which she finally demands answers from him leads to a revelation so bizarre it’s almost a miracle that Shanley manages to make it both howlingly comic and beautifully moving.
The acting here is strong. Tracy skilfully modulates Anthony’s strange aloofness and navigates Shanley’s Irish dialogue like he was born to it. Listen to his horror-stricken Anthony when Rosemary comes on to him: “You’ve been chaste as a dove all your life and now you’re going on like a pirate!”
And deBoer, though her character seems a little shaky in the early going, ultimately does a lovely job of balancing Rosemary’s lovelorn vulnerability with her aggressive strength. You really want these two to get together.
Shanley infuses the play with spirituality.
Rosemary hates the bible (“They should call it The Book of Awful Stories”), but in this Irish countryside, characters hear voices, see “signs from heaven,” and are “touched by the quiet hand of God.”
Mullingar seems just the place for these quiet comic miracles.