"When Irish Eyes Are Sleeping"
Get the Boat and Innit are one-act plays by Irish female
playwrights being given in alternating repertory at the SoHo Playhouse. It’s
unclear why these sleep-inducing plays, each running less than 50 minutes, aren’t
on the same bill. While both are far too tepidly written and produced to
attract a crowd on their own, a double bill might have served as more of an
audience inducement. Fortunately, I was able to see both on the same night, one
of the few on which they’re being offered, in tandem.
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| Eavan Brennan, Siohan Donnellan. |
Get the Boat, by Eavan Brennan, had a curtain time of
6:30 (delayed by around 10 minutes), letting out around 7:20, while Innit, by Colette Forde, went on at 8:30. Anyone attending both
had a large chunk of time to kill in SoHo between the two pieces. This odd
arrangement was made even odder by the failure to provide even the flimsiest of
programs. Thus visitors without benefit of a press representative have no idea
of the writers’ backgrounds, or even the names and contributions of anyone else
involved.
Both plays come to New York from the Limerick Fringe Festival,
and both are given minimal, aesthetically starved physical productions. Get the Boat is a two-hander featuring
playwright Brennan and Siohan Donnellan, but as even the press announcement doesn’t
say who plays whom, I had to go online to determine that Brennan
is Bridget and Donnellan is Grainne.
Before the play proper begins, a brief video compilation is
shown highlighting the abortion controversy in Ireland, which recently led to
the passing, by a resounding vote, of a referendum legalizing the procedure in
that firmly Roman Catholic nation. Get
the Boat was written before the referendum so it’s already a bit dated, but
its central concern still has relevance when it comes to the human—as opposed
to the legal or religious—side of the subject. With abortion again a hot topic on
this side of the pond (the recent Supreme Court nomination, of course), a play
about abortion couldn’t be timelier.
 |
| Eavan Brennan, Siohan Donnellan. |
Get the Boat has a
potentially interesting topic: two young women meet in a cabin on a ferry
presumably taking them to England (no destination is mentioned) to legally
obtain abortions; they argue over their respective reasons for doing so. These
strangers, friendly and supportive at first, eventually clash: Grainne, a
married woman and mother whose fetus is horribly malformed and perhaps even
dying, gets angry when she learns that Bridget, a single mom, is going to abort
a healthy child because of her dire financial circumstances. And that’s about
it.
Whatever dramatic germ this material holds is crushed by the
actresses’ lethargic performances. Although both seem superficially natural, they
practically whisper their conversations, show no sense of urgency, only briefly
display any theatrical energy, and make their turtle-paced 45 minutes or so
seem twice as long. Zzzz.
I assumed that the play was self-directed, although direction
of any kind seems little more than an afterthought. I subsequently discovered
that a Ruth Smith staged it, which doesn’t remove the fact that weak direction
may be the play’s greatest drawback, given that the material deserves better
than what it’s presently getting.
Innit, Collette
Forde’s one-woman play, also features its writer, who was born in Ireland but
raised in Manchester; it, too, fails to a considerable degree from the lack of
directorial shaping. An episodic piece, it reveals an angst-ridden,
trash-talking, Manchester, England, teenager named Kelly Roberts spilling her guts
to a psychologist (“psychiologist,” in her vernacular). The play has multiple,
clumsily lit (uncredited, of course) blackouts during which Kelly stands behind
a screen so her backlit silhouette can be seen dancing to the driving beat of
pop music
Colette Forde.
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| Colette Forde. |
In each of half a dozen brief sessions with her school
shrink she expostulates in brick-thick, vividly colored, Mancunian accent and slang
(the title means “Isn’t it?”) about her sexual experiences, including the
liberties (short of intercourse) she lets the lads take in exchange for smokes
(fags); her conflicts and jealousies with her “dickhead” schoolmates; her place
in the school choir and her singing aspirations; her fears of inadequacy and her
insecurities about her looks; and her boozing, neglectful dad, long separated
from her neurotic, nagging, stingy mam (“a daft bitch and she dresses like a
tramp”), whom she’s afraid of one day becoming.
 |
| Colette Forde. |
Kelly’s monologue, delivered almost entirely in an
underwhelmingly disconnected tone, is frequently accompanied by a disdainful,
goggle-eyed, mouth agape expression (like “duh”). There’s no plotline at all,
merely the ongoing confessions of an alienated girl with implausibly adroit verbal
skills.
 |
| Colette Forde. |
Not once is there the sense of another presence, asking
questions or reacting to her. We understand the girl’s pain but, because of
Forde’s monotonous delivery, feel none of it on a gut level. Except, that is, for
the end, when Kelly prepares for bed, loosens her hair, and lies down in a
fetal position.
It was during those few silent moments, when Kelly’s sadness
and despair burst through more sharply than anything else in either play, that I
was grateful not to have been tempted to close my eyes.
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