Memories of Irish Childhoods

Great White American Teeth by Fiona Walsh
Swansong by Conor McDermottroe
At the Irish Repertory Theatre

By Cahir O’Doherty

AS a girl growing up in rural Ireland, writer and performer Fiona Walsh often felt like an alien. An only child in a street filled with 10 person families, she was as bright as she was gregarious and she stood out for her almost unpatriotic disinterest in sports.

Sensing her difference other children gave her a wide berth, and in her loneliness she turned inward — and then eventually outward — and a star was born.

In her hilarious and immensely likeable turn as the narrator of her own play Great White American Teeth at the Irish Repertory Theatre (in which, naturally, she also stars) Walsh reenacts her vexed childhood among the puzzled locals of Roscrea, Co. Tipperary, each of whom follow her antics with varying degrees of indulgence or consternation. Roscrea, Walsh reminds us, is the bacon capital of the county, and the local butcher is the ordained voice of the community (and what a gossipy community it turns out to be).

It’s a tale as old as time: a misfit is rejected by her community, but in the process she finds her own voice, moves to New York City and become fabulous.

What singles out Walsh’s play is its wit and openhearted joyfulness, which is obviously the result of the talent that created it. Roscrea’s loss was New York City’s gain, clearly.

The play and the community it portrays has a dark side too. Beneath all the brittle gaiety on the stage, we discover that Walsh has had some formative adolescent experiences that would have derailed weaker spirits.

Casually she mentions the putrid smell of bone and gristle that wafts out of the bacon factory on certain days, she mentions hearing the squealing pigs in their death throes, but before we can even shudder, reflexively she’s off again on another distracting caper that has us laughing once more.

Teenage erotic stirrings, in Walsh’s case, bring with them gossamer dreams of Warren Beatty and his preternaturally perfect teeth and sun tan. In comparison to her Hollywood idol, the local lads of Roscrea are a let down indeed. The future, it become clear, will involve disco music, glittering fashions, extensive dining options and a plane ticket.

There’s a quiet tenderness lurking beneath the surface of her play, for her home town, for its colorful characters, for her family and even for herself for having survived the ill starred marriage that was her life there until the day she finally left.

Walsh skillfully manages all of these disparate elements without ever once veering into sentimentality or score settling – and so we’re treated to a vivid memoir with the most reassuringly of American of outcomes, a happy ending.

Swans that bloom in a community full of signets is also, in a way, the theme of Conor McDermottroe’s pugilistic one act Swansong. Performed with a blistering intensity by Tim Ruddy, the play is a fast, furious ride through societal dysfunction in the west of Ireland.

It’s Ruddy’s performance that drives the play, and the playwright could not have asked for a better actor. Skilled, focused and whip smart his performance is one of the strongest witnessed on a New York stage this year. (The wily Irish Rep seems to have completely cornered the market on emerging Irish acting talent).

Given that the play has found a superb actor, it’s a shame the material cannot quite match the performance. Swansong has a great deal to recommend it -– it’s economically and persuasively written, it’s remorseless in its portrayal of a young man’s life coming apart at the seams. But it is also curiously humorless, to the point where its swaggering machismo often alienates rather than unsettles.

Central to plays theme is the contestable idea that being born out of wedlock is still the unspeakable social stigma that it once was, and that the accompanying shame can unravel a young man’s life. Since those last two points are — at the least — a little more subjective nowadays, it seems as if McDermottroe piles on the stigma a bit heavily.

Hidden beneath all the macho posturing, this is also a play about how utterly fragile masculinity actually is, and how that terrifying knowledge is often masked with brutal violence.

Calling the boy at the center of the play a bastard is the trigger word that sets him off, unleashing ever-spiraling violence that leads to his doom. But he’s a man more sinned against than sinning, and we are invited to observe how mistreatment begets mistreatment, and how damage accumulates over the years.

But with its overarching sorrow and mounting brutality, in the end Swansong remains as elusive and distant as those haughty creatures it takes its title from.

(Great White American Teeth and Swansong are staged by the Irish Repertory Theatre in their second stage, W. Scott McLucas Studio Theatre space. Visit www.irishrep.org.)