February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Virtually everything about “The Lepers of Baile Baiste,” the galvanic, albeit flawed, Noone melodrama, which opened Monday night, is resolutely Irish, from its grungy small-town setting to its ironic title, not to mention the contentious nature of most of its troubled characters.
The play is not precisely new, having been written when the playwright was a relatively new arrival. The subject, however, sexual abuse at the hands of the Catholic clergy, might have lifted from recent newspaper accounts.
In fact, when “The Lepers of Baile Baiste” was first produced in Boston, the city’s newspapers were full of reports of a particularly virulent example, to the point where people tended to suspect the priest’s lamentable history, was the inspiration for Noone’s gripping play.
The play’s four main characters, lads in perhaps their middle 20s, aren’t lepers, except in the respect that their shared sexual mishandling by the vanished Brother Angelus has marked them for life.
The latter part of Noone’s title, “Baile Baiste,” translates from Irish Gaelic as “Town of Rain,” or perhaps “Raintown.”
Two of the play’s most interesting characters, potentially at least, never appear. In addition to Angelus, who has apparently taken flight to escape his crimes, there is a fifth “friend,” Simon, who commits suicide during the course of the tale.
The four boys who do make it onto the stage of the Phil Bosakowski Theatre cannot really be truthfully said to be ‘friends” in any conventional sense of the word. The ugly experiences to which they have been subjected have poisoned their relationships with each other, fatally killing off whatever fellow feelings they say have had as they were growing up together.
In a sense, this is where the play’s problems begin. None of Noone’s major characters are particularly sympathetic. As a result, they’re difficult to like.
Daithi O’Neil, the angriest and most revenge-prone of the four, is obsessive and monomaniacal, not to mention bizarrely fond of pilfering church statuary. Peter “Clown” Quinn is a shattered, boozy weakling. Michael “Ladeen” Toner is a self-centered, garrulous bore with a laugh equaling the braying of a donkey. Aloysius “Yowsa” O’Dowd, the only one of the quartet gearing up for an escape, is potentially a combustible bully.
David Sullivan’s well-paced production is intelligently cast. Dara Coleman, familiar from productions at both the Irish Repertory Theatre and the Irish Arts Center, is a vengeful and inherently threatening Daithi, while David Ian Lee’s pathetic, victimized ‘”Clown” is both promising and intriguing, until, intoxicated and eventually asleep, he more or less drops out of the play’s second act.
“Yowsa,” in the powerful presence of the debuting Ciaran Crawford, the only cast member to have taken part in the play’s earlier Boston production, arrives late and makes his mark, while Jeffrey M. Bender, as “Ladeen,” seems both over-the-top and vaguely out of phase with the others.
Despite brief visits to the local Catholic church and sacristy, “The Lepers of Baile Baiste” never leaves the pub, and it’s tempting to wonder why, considering the wall-to-wall hostility boiling in the place, any of the regulars would set foot in the place.
Noone’s play, his first, was workshopped in Boston in October 2001, and later at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. Its first professional production took place at Boston’s Sugan Theatre Company in November 2002.
The playwright’s dialogue is vivid and speakable, even when his characters aren’t entirely convincing, and his plot seems peculiarly clouded and indirect.
It’s easy to see why “The Lepers of Baile Baiste” has attracted as much positive attention as it has. It is apparently the first part of a cycle to be known as the “Baile Baiste Trilogy.”
In the future, it is to be hoped, Noone will get his people out of the pub in the future, or, failing that, find a way to let a little fresh air into the fetid confines he has created in his first play.