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Cycles of history

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

Parker, a working-class Belfast Protestant, never had much luck, and most of what he did have was devastatingly bad. He lost a leg to cancer when he was 19 and died of the disease at age 47, in London in 1988.
The playwright?s eloquently raffish, resoundingly original ?Spokesong? debuted at the Dublin Theatre Festival in 1975 and then transferred to London. Its first American staging took place at New Haven?s Long Wharf Theater in 1978 in a production that subsequently moved to the Circle-in-the-Square in New York.
Now ?Spokesong? is briefly back in town, in a modest but inspired production of the Storm Theatre directed by the group?s artistic director, Peter Dobbins.
Parker?s clean-limbed, eloquent play is part romance, part blithe-spirited social history lesson, part musical, and, not least of all, part lament for the religious and economic strife that has torn Ireland apart for so many years.
?Spokesong? takes place on several time levels, the primary ?present tense? being 1973, with the main ?flashback? set in ?the 1890s.? Other scenes capture moments, to quote the printed program, ?ranging from the 1890s to the 1940s.?
The location, as the title might suggest, is a hardscrabble Belfast bicycle shop, trying to stay alive, not to say solvent, while the city crumbles and shatters beyond its doorway.
The owner of the shop, Frank Stock, chats with the audience, takes part in the action, recalls his paternal grandfather, Francis Stock, who founded the business, and even sings a little.
The success of any production of ?Spokesong? depends rather heavily on the casting of Frank, a character played at Long Wharf and then at Circle-in-the-Square by John Lithgow.
Director Dobbins has been exceedingly fortunate in finding a little-known singer and actor, Michael Mendiola, for the role. Graceful, affable, personable and musically adroit, Mendiola guides the audience through the show with style and generosity.
The actor, who appears to have done a spat of musicals in regional theaters, the most recent being the Boston production of off-Broadway?s ?Bat Boy the Musical,? is someone to watch. Lean and long-faced, he possesses much of the skill and charm that made a star of James Stewart some seven decades back.
The Storm?s six-actor cast is uniformly fine, from Robin Haynes?s sympathetic work as Frank?s grandfather to Ethan Flower?s portrait of his somewhat sinister adoptive ?brother,? Julian.
As Kitty Carberry and Daisy Bell, the Belfast girls who love, respectively, Frank and Francis, Colleen Crawford and Jill Anderson are standouts.
As the unnamed character known only as ?the Trick cyclist,? a role played earlier on by the late Irish-born Joseph Maher, Paul Jackel sings well but cycles poorly, a situation that can only improve between now and the show?s final performance.
Parker?s research, like his political attitude is subtle and humane, providing bountiful detail, such as the fact that the pneumatic inflatable bicycle tire was invented somewhat haphazardly by a Scottish veterinarian named John Boyd Dunlop.
Francis?s betrothed, Kitty, is a liberal thinker who refers to Ireland ironically as ?West Britain,? a term employed, half-a-century earlier, by a free-thinking female character in James Joyce?s great story ?The Dead.?
Frank?s vis-

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