Fusion to present ‘Miracle of Ballydonal’
Fusion Theatre is spicing the holidays with a bit of romance, and a dollop of Irish humor.
“The Miracle of Ballydonal” opens Wednesday, Nov. 27, at the Cell Theatre, running from Thursdays through Sundays through Dec. 27. It moves to a pay-what-you-will performance at the KiMo Theatre Dec. 28-29 and includes a Dec. 4 stop at the Blue Grasshopper Brewery. It heads north to Los Alamos on Dec. 7 and Santa Fe on Dec. 14.
The play opens on a foggy Christmas Eve in a pub in Ballydonal, a small, remote Irish fishing village forgotten by both time and place.
Three men have gathered to say farewell to Eileen, but a “miracle” interrupts their reverie.
The show premiered in a sold-out staged reading at Fusion in 2018.
“This started out as a writing exercise in a workshop,” playwright James Caputo said in a telephone interview from San Diego. “The assignment was to find something in the newspaper and write a five-page script.”
The news story in question was depressing, so Caputo backflipped the essentials.
“There were two janitors who came to a sports pub in the morning to clean up from the night before,” he said. “They find a dead baby in the ladies’ restroom.
“I decided the baby had to be alive,” he continued. “I moved it to Ireland. It was an Irish pub.”
Caputo spent six months editing and rewriting the piece.
“I felt I had the ability to write in an Irish voice,” he explained. “Despite my name, I’m three-quarters Irish.”
Eileen and One Shot have been dating for 10 years but never married.
“The reason they haven’t gotten married is they all live in Ballydonal,” Caputo said. “In Ballydonal, almost everybody’s a descendant of Donal the shepherd, and One Shot is not. They cannot get married because of parental interference.”
The two cousins Finn Be Gone and St. Jack also meet at the pub as they face middle age alone. When St. Jack goes to the men’s room, he discovers a swaddled and very much alive infant in the sink.
“It dawns on (the three men) that one of them must be the father of the baby,” Caputo said. “There’s no water, so they baptize him with Guinness.”
The mysteries in this ensemble piece slowly unfurl.
“This is the most difficult play I’ve ever written,” Caputo said. “You don’t sense it when you’re watching it, but there are very complicated timelines, and (it’s) keeping all the families straight.”
“The Miracle of Ballydonal” marks Caputo’s fourth play at Fusion. He was a winner of “The Seven” for his short play “Amy’s Wish.” He also has won awards at the Ashland Oregon New Play Festival, the Mountain Playhouse Contest and the Theatre Oxford Competition. His plays have been produced from New York to Hollywood.