Andytown blues

The setting is the Andersonstown section of West Belfast in Northern Ireland and the date, according to the program, is 1990, although, in some ways, the play seems to be taking place a decade earlier.
The four women, the widow, Marie, the spiky, still-young Cassie, her mother, Nora, and the enigmatic, ghostlike Deirdre, prattle on about 1960s icons such as Cilla Black and David Essex, using casual, gossipy conversation as a way of masking the loss and confusion they feel.
With the exception of Deirdre, who is both something of an outsider and a not-entirely-successful literary device on the part of the author, these women know each other as well as they know the streets and alleys of their Catholic enclave, which was once a working-class neighborhood but has, over the troubled years, become something much closer to a prison.
?Bold Girls? is set in Marie?s cluttered row house. Her late husband, Michael, is represented by a portrait and a wedding picture that hang below a crucifix on a wall of the apartment. Outside, the words ?Brits Out!? are scrawled in plain view.
In Michael?s absence, Marie is free to reinvent him as a loyal husband instead of the philanderer we eventually learn him to have been. Michael has been dead for two and a half years, but his fundamentally optimistic widow has become the self-appointed guardian of his image, even as she screams at the couple?s two unseen children, playing elsewhere in the dingy dwelling.
The febrile, tough-mouthed Cassie says openly that she?s just as glad her Joe was arrested and imprisoned, while she, probably an impulsive girl who married much too young, doesn?t really care whether she ever sees him again.
There?s evident bad blood between Cassie and her more conventional-seeming mother, Nora. When asked by Marie, who, as a close-at-hand neighbor with an intimate knowledge of her friends, ought to have known anyway, if there?s been a ?falling out? between the two women, Cassie replies, ?My mother and I fell out on the delivery room floor.?
The ghostly, childlike Deirdre, who seems, in fact, to be a phantom in the play?s first few scenes, holds the key to whatever secrets ?Bold Girls? contains, but she?s also the element that makes the play, ultimately, less than wholly satisfactory.
The ?solution? Deirdre eventually provides for the riddle of her presence in the house and, indeed, on the planet, drags the play down to the level of a kind of comic soap opera, although the difficult, enigmatic character is reasonably well-played by the gamine-like Moira MacDonald.
?Bold Girls? is at its strongest delineating the subtle changes in the long-term relationship shared by Marie, Nora and Cassie.
The play, scene by scene, rings true, and sounds right. Much credit for the company?s ease with the tricky tones of working-class citizens of Northern Ireland must go to Steve Gabis, one of the finest dialect coaches in the New York theater.
The women of ?Bold Girls? have become all too accustomed to the sight of helicopters hovering overhead, the sound of random gunfire, and even the distressing sight of buildings burning against the Andersonstown skyline.
As anyone who?s been reading the dispatches from Baghdad knows, mundane, ordinary life has a way of continuing along, step in step, with warfare.
Clothes must be washed, diapers need changing and these Belfast women try desperately to maintain their dignity, even to the point of being outraged by the soldiers whose boots trample the modest flowerbeds in front of their homes.
Emphasizing the dailiness of these women?s lives, a long wash-line hung with diapers, towels and various undergarments stretches across the set as the characters bicker and chatter.
Marie saves bread scraps for feeding to the birds, even as buses burn at the end of the street.
The lives in ?Bold Girls? are meticulously detailed, but there?s something slightly overly familiar about these people, which is probably a result of the number of films, documentary and fiction alike, which have been produced on the subject over the years.
For anyone fortunate enough to have seen ?Binlids,? which was brought to New York three years ago from Belfast, ?Bold Girls? may come across as chewed-over meat.
?Binlids,? which played just a few performances in a former synagogue on the Lower East Side, featured a cast, the female members of which were the actual women who had experienced and endured the incidents depicted in the narrative. They were, in other words, reenacting their own personal histories, sometimes at the evident cost of great personal pain.
The title ?Binlids,? by the way, referred to the custom of the women of West Belfast beating on the sidewalk with garbage can covers to warn their neighbors that the B-Specials or the members of the RUC were prowling the neighborhood.
Rona Munro?s ?Bold Girls? was given a vastly less effective showcase production a couple of seasons ago. The prolific Scottish-born writer will be represented only a few weeks from now by a more recent play, ?Iron,? in a production of the Manhattan Theatre Club at the City Center?s Stage II.
Munro, whose ?Bold Girls? won London?s Evening Standard Award and the Susan Smith Blackburn Award, is also the author of ?Ladybird, Ladybird,? one of the most acclaimed of the films of director Ken Loach, and last year?s well-reviewed German feature, ?Aimee and Jaguar.?
In ?Bold Girls,? Munro has succumbed to the questionable lure of a string of direct-to-audience monologues, which the play?s director, Ludovica Villar-Hauser, has failed to make as clear as ideally might have been the case.
The ?Bold Girls? cast, particularly Susan Barrett?s Marie, Paula Ewin?s Nora and Heidi James? Cassie, cannot be faulted, but the play that contains them isn?t, unfortunately, of what could be called the first freshness.