“Baby Face”
Why, one might wonder, did the matinee audience when I
attended Irish playwright David Ireland’s Cyprus
Avenue at the Public greet this intensely emotional, explosively acted, and
muscularly verbal play with such tepidly polite applause?
Could it have been the handling of an infant’s fate in an even more sensationalistic way than what was done in Edward Bond’s Saved (1965)? Could it have been because of the other horrifically violent deeds they’d just witnessed? Could it have been the lack of immediate resonance for a New York audience in the Protestant-Catholic, Unionist-IRA divide that roiled Irish life for so many years and still courses beneath Northern Irish culture?
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| Stephen Rea, Ronke Adékoluẹjo. Photo: Ros Kavanagh. |
Could it have been because the central issue—the bizarre
obsession of a bigoted, eccentric, middle-class man—is hard to sit through for
an uninterrupted hour and 40 minutes of skewed self-justifications? Or could it
have been because the play exists in a world where three of its five characters
are determinedly sane while two get by while being murderously batty?
On
the one hand, I have to admit being gripped by Ireland’s often corrosively
toxic, yet bitingly funny, language; by the singular excellence of the five-member
cast brought over from the original staging co-produced by Dublin’s Abbey Theatre
and London’s Royal Court Theatre; and—for a few moments, at any rate—by the
play’s premise and point of view.
Eventually, though, Cyprus
Avenue, named for a Belfast street where the leading character grew up, is unable to maintain a minimal level
of plausibility, forcing you to watch its wheels spinning mainly under the power
of its vibrant acting, especially that of the marvelous Stephen Rea (The Crying Game) doing his best to make
a near-impossible role believable.
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| Andrea Irvine, Amy Molloy. Photo: Ros Kavanagh. |
Rea plays Eric, father of Julie (Amy Molloy) and husband of
Bernie (Andrea Irvine), whom we meet being interviewed by Bridget (Ronke
Adékoluẹjo), a mental health specialist. Bridget happens to be black, which
prompts the oblivious Eric to refer to her with the “n” word. This casual slur
reveals a man teeming with intolerance and delusions; in fact, he’s convinced that
his newborn granddaughter doesn’t merely bear a resemblance to Gerry Adams, the bearded
Irish republican politician and former Sinn Féin leader, but actually is him.
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| Amy Molloy. Photo: Ros Kavanagh. |
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| Stephen Rea, Chris Corrigan. Photo: Ros Kavanagh. |
I’ll skip further plot details, noting only that when the
play ends, the white-carpeted stage (designed, along with the costumes, by
Lizzie Clachie), resembles a Shakespearean tragedy. The set, by the way, is
little more than an open platform with two white leather settees, perfectly
lit by Paul Keogan, and placed between the audience seating on either side.
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| Stephen Rea. Photo: Ros Kavanagh. |
For all its discomfiting dramatic tension and vicious
behavior, Cyprus Avenue, sharply directed
by Vicky Featherstone, is too exaggerated to take seriously. It’s intended as a
devilish satire in the vein of Jonathan Swift on the incivility of our political
discourse, wherein people say the worst things possible about their political,
religious, or racial opposites, even taking matters into their own hands when
pushed far enough. It’s a pertinent theme but hard to appreciate when its chief
exemplar is a blooming idiot who tests his conviction by drawing a beard on an
infant with a magic marker and putting tiny spectacles on her.
Given the normalcy of Eric’s wife and daughter, who—until
things get out of hand—bend over backward to accommodate his outbursts, and the
idiocy of his fervent belief that the baby is who he says it is, it’s hard to
accept that they didn’t do something about dear old dad’s lunacy while there
was still time. But the most egregious overstepping comes in the person of
Slim, the second lunatic, who, despite being well-read in the extreme, is
ready—for a while, at least—to shoot a five-week old in her carriage.
Corrigan and Rea make a perfect pair as the menacing Slim and
the vituperative Eric, although it's the latter, whose slouching gait, curly mop,
and memorably sad sack face is what you’ll be paying to see. Nonetheless, it’s a
baby’s face that dominates Cyprus Avenue
and causes so much bloody mayhem.
OTHER VIEWPOINTS:
Public Theater/LuEsther
Hall
425 Lafayette St. NYC
Through July 29