February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
By Joseph Hurley
IRISH ARTS CENTER benefit at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Friday, March 24.
Self-celebration — in the shape of benefits, fund-raisers and myriad other festive forms — comes naturally to theatrical organizations. The Irish Arts Center, however, had a particularly valid reason for the appealingly routined evening they staged last Friday, starting with a champagne reception and stage presentation at the John Jay Theater on Tenth Avenue, and continuing into the night with an informal "seisiun" at the group’s home a few blocks south on 51st Street.
It was, after all, the Irish Arts Center’s 25th Anniversary, a full quarter-century of music, dance, language and theater instruction and performance having passed since the day in 1975 when the late Paul O’Dwyer arranged for a loosely strung group of teachers and performers to take over a small, neglected building on the cusp of Eleventh Avenue for, according to most accounts, the sum of one dollar a year.
The Irish Arts Center is a little like Carlotta, the faded film star of the Stephen Sondheim musical "Follies," who sings that she’s been "through good times and bad times, but I’m still here." The little Irish house near the Hudson River has withstood a few financial periods so tough that the place seemed almost moribund.
The Center saw the arrival and subsequent departure first of Jim Sheridan and then of his partner, Nye Heron, as they moved on to bigger things. Now, with the advent of Executive Director Pauline Turley, from Newry, Co. Down, by way of a degree in Irish Theater from Trinity College, Dublin, the organization’s activity level seems fairly ferocious, and Friday’s 25th Anniversary Celebration fairly bristled with energy and boundless optimism.
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As the cocktail reception ended, making way for the evening’s major program on the stage of John Jay’s handsome auditorium, piper Tom Downes signaled audience members that the time had come to take their seats.
After a few introductory words from Executive Director Turley, the evening’s master of ceremonies, Frank McCourt, author of "Angela’s Ashes," took over, offering anecdotes stemming from his earliest association with the Center, as a teacher moonlighting as an actor in the eight-performer, all-male cast of Terry George’s play "The Tunnel," produced on the West 51st Street stage in 1987.
In those early days, years before the theater’s extensive restoration, conditions at the Irish Arts Center were, to put it kindly, rough. McCourt recalled the single backstage toilet that "leaned toward New Jersey" under a roof that tended to leak.
The teacher-turned-memoirist recalled that, in the absence of a costume designer, the cast members were required to search their own closets for "clothing suitable to Long Kesh."
McCourt turned the stage over to veteran actor Mickey Kelly, who presented a moving and beautifully rendered segment from "An Beal Bocht," ("The Poor Mouth"), by the legendary Dublin author and journalist Flann O’Brien.
The evening’s first musical selections came from Bill Ochs, who runs the Center’s tin whistle workshops and is the author of a book, "A Handbook for the Clarke Tin Whistle," now in its 11th printing. Ochs played "Molly St. George," an 18th century harp tune, and "Jim Donoghue’s Reel."
Colin Quinn, perhaps best known for his work on Saturday Night Live, followed, with a brief, punchy monologue touching on what has by now become, to an extent, the comic’s stock in trade, namely the characteristically Irish lack of self-confidence.
A distinct highlight of the benefit’s menu was a deft performance of a few scenes from Janet Noble’s trenchant and humorous immigration saga, "Away Alone," a hit for the Center in the 1989-90 season. Participants on Friday night included Don Creedon and Anto Nolan, both revisiting the roles they played in the original production, plus Con Horgan, Brian Mallon and John Keating, with Tracey Ferguson providing stage directions.
The program’s first half was brought to a close by a sample of Irish step dancing by the students of Ann Marie Acosta, who teaches at the Center and whose classes are filled by the neighborhood’s multi-racial children.
After a 15-minute intermission, the benefit evening resumed with a well-received scene from actor-playwright Creedon’s "Celtic Tiger (Me Arse,)" the group’s current production.
The scene, set in a Dublin neighborhood pub on the occasion of a local lad’s return to "the new Ireland," following a dozen years in New York, forms an ironic contrast to Noble’s play, which deals with a group of undocumented young recent arrivals from Ireland trying to make a go of it in the Bainbridge Avenue section of the Bronx, circa 1985.
The actors involved in the benefit selection from "Celtic Tiger (Me Arse)" featured Sean Power as the returnee, with John Keating and Paul McGrane as two of his Dublin chums who stayed behind in Ireland. All three are in the play’s Irish Arts Center’s highly praised staging of Creedon’s perceptive comedy.
The Center ended its benefit evening with a performance by the extraordinary Josephine McNamara, another of the Center’s step dancing instructors. The beloved "Jo," associated with the Center for more than 20 years, recited a poem and then did an elaborate and fluid tap dance, much to the delight of the near-capacity audience.