Blood grudges

There’s the alienated brother returning from the United States with a bride the family hasn’t yet met. The locale this time is, as specified in the production’s program “a small town in Co. Clare, Ireland,” but the people, not to mention the bind in which they find themselves, could be right out of Tom Murphy’s “A Whistle in the Dark,” or, for that matter, Harold Pinter’s “The Homecoming.”
Or, reaching back a few decades further, a very similar situation obtains in John Murphy’s “The Country Boy,” a prime example of the sort of weak, rural drama the Abbey Theatre used to do with distressing regularity in its worst seasons.
The program pinpoints the time as “the present,” and the specific venue as “the Riordan House,” but the play feels as though it were taking place a fair number of years in the past, so it comes as not much of a shock if the play’s shiftless husband and his heroic, long-suffering wife conjure up images of the unhappy occupants of the Boyle household in Sean O’Casey’s “Juno and the Paycock,” and others as well.
This is not meant to accuse playwright Noble of plagiarism, but, rather, to suggest that very much, probably too much, of Irish, and English, drama is drawn from a common well, made up of the same component parts, and sent hurtling down the same tortured path to its all-too-predictable conclusions.
The playwright has included even a shadow of Brian Friel in the presence of a mildly retarded character, the affable but strangely muddle-headed Bobby Quinn, who may call to mind Jimmy Jack, the “idiot savant” of the Donegal master’s “Translations.”
Its copious “influences” notwithstanding, “The Pagans” impresses, at least in the current production, as being almost alarmingly un-Irish in nearly every respect.
Once again, the program provides a fairly reasonable explanation. A generous and highly unusual note lists over a dozen actors who took part in one or another of the readings “The Pagans” received at the Abingdon over the course of the last two years. Most of the names will be familiar to patrons of the Irish Repertory Theatre, stalwart Irish and Irish-delivered individuals including Dara Coleman, George Heslin, John Keating, Paddy Croft, Sean Dougherty, W.B. Brydon and “the late Pauline Flanagan, whom we dearly miss.”
Despite this gesture of warm appreciation for the contributions rendered by members of New York’s Irish acting community, there appears to be, judging by the progam, not a single Irish or Irish-American performer in the eight-actor cast of director Stephen Hollis’ staging of “The Pagans.”
Unsurprisingly, then, the speech coming out of Noble’s octet ranges all over the map, wandering, at times, as far a field from County Clare as Belfast, Dublin, and even London.
Thomas Riordan and his wife, Margaret, occupy a small house in Clare, a situation made all the more cramped by the annoyingly complaint-laden presence of Mrs. Riordan’s stiff-backed and pious spinster sister, Frances, a barely tolerated thorn in everyone’s side.
One Riordan son, Michael, has returned from America for a visit, accompanied by Anna Leigh, his spoiled young wife, by whose wealthy, controlling father he is restlessly employed.
Michael and his rough-mannered, stay-at-home brother, Tadhg, are seriously estranged, the not-so-surprising reason for the split having to do with a young son one or the other fathered, courtesy of Danaan O’ Doherty, a comely, strong-willed local girl who is employed, as is the “limited” Bobby, by the town’s fish-packing plant.
There is, predictably enough, much exercising of ancient animosities, revealing, for the benefit of the audience, details of the airless, fetid domicile, grudges and hostilities all too familiar to the structure’s rather tedious inhabitants.
It is to playwright Noble’s credit that, amidst a welter of mainly predictable plotting, she manages to keep the issue of the unseen child’s paternity at least relatively clouded until the play’s closing moments.
The characters at the heart of “The Pagans” somehow manage to resolve their entrenched family conflicts and dispense with their blood-linked grudges just before the lights go down for the last time on that embattled Clare cottage.
The mechanisms which bring all this score-settling are so arbitrary that a decidedly pat quality hovers over the whole endeavor, pretty much from start to finish.
Director Hollis, who, a few months ago, did such an outstanding job of staging Brian Friel’s adaptation of Ivan Turgenev’s classic novel, “Fathers and Sons,” for T.A.C.T., The Actors Company Theatre, has, ethnicity aside, deployed his actors at least reasonably well.
Nora Chester and Frank Anderson are credible as the play’s enervated householders, as in Susanne Marley as the annoying and intrusive resident in-law, Aunt Frances, whom Tadhg habitually refers to as “Skin and Bones.”
As Tadhg, Christopher Drescher is suitably threatening, while the imposing Steven Richard stands out as the detested Michael.
Victoria Adams is attractive as Michael’s pampered spouse, while the production’s most memorable performances are probably those of Rachel Fowler, recently seen in the Mint Theater’s acclaimed staging of D. H. Lawrence’s “The Daughter-in-Law,” and Mark Alhadeff, who last season did an outstanding job in Conor McPherson’s corrosive one-actor play, “Rum & Vodka.”
Fowler’s Danaan and Alhadeff’s Bobby, characters who work side-by-side as “fish gutters” in one of the town’s less appealing industries, bring fire, clarity, and much-needed humanity to those portions of “The Pagans” in which they appear.
Noble’s title, by the way, refers to the bitter accusations the cold and religion-obsessed old spinster aunt, Frances, hurls at virtually everyone who comes within hearing distance.