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Irish Voice Entertainment

Pump It Up!

December 5, 2007

By Cahir O’Doherty

For a first time playwright Abbie Spallen is making an impressive debut at the Manhattan Theatre Club this month. Pumpgirl, her hard-hitting drama about three lost souls scratching out a living in an Irish border town, is one of the most accomplished Irish theater debuts in years. CAHIR O’DOHERTY talks to the Newry-based writer about the play.

VERY few playwrights start at the top. Usually there are years of amateur productions, writer’s workshops, rejection letters and sheer hard graft to get through. But luckily for first time playwright Abbie Spallen, that long and winding road ended before it began.

Although the 39-year-old Newry, Co. Down-based writer and actress grew up in what she calls a fairly rough council estate, there’s more than a hint of a fairytale ending in her recent good fortune. Right out of the starting gate she’s hit the playwriting jackpot — this week her debut play Pumpgirl opens at the Manhattan Theatre Club, with gifted actors in the starring roles and rave reviews imminent.

Pumpgirl features Belfast actress Geraldine Hughes (last seen here in Brian Friel’s Translations on Broadway) in a tour de force performance that is sure to increase her stature as a star of the theater. Hughes, who grew up in the equally hardscrabble working class neighborhood of West Belfast, is perfectly cast as a tough young woman who may have missed her last chance to forge a meaningful relationship.

Although playwright Spallen was in New York for the first week of the rehearsal, she quickly took off to Spain to finish her new follow up play, a work commissioned by the famous Bush Theatre in London, which was first in line to stage her English debut.

This week Spallen is staying at a guesthouse in the foothills of northern Spain as she speaks to the Irish Voice. For such a remote region cell phone reception is surprisingly good, and she’s sounding happy and relaxed.

Sun-soaked Spain is a very long way from the drizzly streets of Newry, but then again so is Manhattan, and New York audiences are having no trouble understanding Spallen’s play at all.

“I’m from where Pumpgirl is set — in the back roads and border lands of Newry. I grew up in a fairly rough council estate, where my father was a school teacher, so for that reason we used to regularly get the s***e knocked out of us, which was great fun,” Spallen says.

From the beginning Spallen’s life was more often marked by the differences rather than the similarities that separated her from her hometown. For a start her family was considered unusual for having so many books in the house, which quickly became one of the compelling reasons she’d often get the tar knocked out of her by the local toughs.

“It wasn’t the done thing in Newry to read a lot of books at the time I was growing up, you know? But it was interesting to have the dual influences – to have all these books and at the same time have a completely working class community all around you,” Spallen recalls.

“My dad was from the Ardoyne area of Belfast. He was one of the first Catholics allowed into Queens University in the 1950s. He was in the very first year.”

Spallen inherited her father’s tenacious stand up and be counted nature, and soon she was pursuing her own dream to become an actress. Theater roles and low budget film work eventually followed, but over time she began to feel they were creatively restricting.

“I’ve been an actor in Ireland, and like most actresses I often had time on my hands so I just started to write, you know?” she says.

“And the more I did the more writing took over. Now I think I’m about to be dumped by my agent because I just haven’t been available for any acting job for the past three years.”

Inspiration struck at exactly the right moment. Driving back home to Newry one night after a disastrous production of Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening in, of all places, Clonmel, Co. Tipperary, Spallen stopped off to buy petrol at a local gas station. A young girl came out of the service station to look at her car.

The young female attendant was so into her job, and so keen to please that Spallen suddenly realized there was a girl like her in every town in Ireland. Girls who were fixated on the GAA, girls who were very butch but not gay, girls who were often just trying to be one of the lads, but who were actually laughed at.

Spallen found her fascinating and realized that there was a real character standing in front of her. It was then that the second character in PumpGirl called Hammy, the boy racer she falls for, just evolved.

“There was a guy who used to live on our estate who used to work in a chicken hatchery. We nicknamed him Budgie,” says Spallen.

“He used to walk around everywhere in slippers. Another lad I used to see around the place literally became the character Hammy. The inspirations for the people in this play were all around me, really.”

There were a few clear life lessons in Pumpgirl for the playwright herself, too. After all, she was writing a version of what her life might have been like if she was still stuck living in that Newry council estate. If she was trapped in a marriage with that sort of loneliness at its center.

“I think that’s where the character Sinead in the play came from,” says Spallen. “From thinking just how the hell would I feel if I was still in that environment? Sinead has an intelligence that has no outlet. One man comes along and speaks one line of poetry to her and she falls for him right away. It’s tragic.”

Spallen talks about how lucky she has been with the play’s casting, noting the commitment her actors have made to the play. And in Geraldine Hughes she has found the perfect interpretation of Sinead, the embittered housewife character at the center of the drama.

“When they sent me the script I read it and because nowadays I have such an American sensibility – I mean I’ve been living here now for as long as I was living in Ireland – I actually pictured American imagery,” says Hughes.

“Like any desolate gas station with the tumbleweed blowing that you’d see across the country. It really works both ways, for both audiences.”

For Hughes the real challenge of the play was learning the mountain of lines. Now in its third week of production, the actors are finally discovering their own characters and where the play needs to go.

It certainly helps that the two American actors are among the most accomplished in American theater. Paul Sparks and Hannah Cabell are the physical embodiment of the Irish characters they play.

“We fight for the work, and it’s very rare when you’re partnered with actors that have the same philosophy. I really think we were all sort of meant to do it. It feels very special,” says Hughes.

“And it’s the first time that I really get to play a real Irish woman on stage. This is a play that’s as funny as it is tragic. What more could you ask for?”

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