February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
In Margaret Edson’s “Wit,” an acerbic university professor comes to grips with her own mortality, while the central figures of British playwright Brian Clark’s “Whose Life is it anyway?” and the current Spanish film, “The Sea Inside,” both of them paralyzed as the result of accidents, struggle to end their own lives and terminate a situation they find intolerable.
Now, Aidan Mathews’s “Communion” is being given its first American production at the Phil Bosakowski Theatre, courtesy of the Origin Theatre Company, formed some five years ago, with its stated goal of introducing as-yet-unfamiliar European, but mainly Irish, writers to American audiences.
Mathews, a 48-year-old Dubliner, is best-known as a poet and the author of admired short stories, and indeed, one member of the opening night audience for “Communion” was heard to say, “This is a poet’s play, not a dramatist’s.”
The remark is accurate only in the respect that the writer, having elected an undeniably valid subject, more or less surrenders to the static situation he has created, remaining in the confining corner into which he has painted himself.
Jordan McHenry is an intelligent young Dubliner who, nearing the end of his medical studies, has been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. For all but one of the play’s five scenes, stretching from mid-July to Mid-August of a summer in the late 1990s, he lies, often inert and sometimes semi-conscious, in a bed on the second floor of his family’s home in what the program describes as “a fashionable Dublin suburb.”
The world that swirls around him is composed, for the most part of his caring brother, Marcus, a frequently hospitalized mental patient whose wrists bear the evidence of at least one suicide attempt, and his embittered mother, Martha.
There are visitors, one of whom, Fr. Anthony O’Driscoll, is an enervated returnee from the African missions, back from Rwanda with his future uncertain and even his faith in a shaky state.
Then, too, there is Arthur McLoughlin, a Methodist neighbor with some sort of nautical background and a greenhouse full of cannabis.
Last to arrive is Felicity Spellman, a vaguely drawn blithe spirit, another neighbor, seemingly in love with Marcus.
Jordan, rendered bald by his medication and his therapy, is on his final downward slide even in the play’s opening moments, with the roguish Marcus amusing him by “reading” a salacious narrative involving a nun, a priest who wants to be addressed as “Monsignor,” and lewd doings carried on at the foot of the altar.
The brothers’ widowed mother, tight-lipped, with tension oozing from every pore, comes and goes, ministering to the patient, and maintaining a perfunctory deathwatch in which she seems to have, most of the time, little if any genuine personal investment.
Martha’s most clearly defined emotion, anger, seems directed inward, at herself, and outward, at Marcus, for reasons which never become entirely comprehensible.
Marcus, for his part, manifests, almost overwhelmingly, the only true feeling for Jordan that the playwright allows himself or his characters.
Jordan, the stricken doctor-in-training is, when Mathews opts to pick up the thread of the story, already so far along in his disintegration that he is barely a functioning character at all, which pitches “Communion” in the direction of Marcus, and, to a lesser degree, that of his mother.
Since the reasons underlying the icy, chasm-like void that yawns between Marcus and his mother are, in the main, left unexplored, what seems to be, at least potentially, the tale’s most compelling aspect remains something of a blank.
Stand or fall, Marcus is Mathews’s most interesting character. Intelligent, creative, imaginative, albeit severely wounded by his mental affliction, he appears to have one and only one visible goal remaining, namely to serve as the captain of his brother’s ship, and ease Jordan’s passing.
The priest, his vision clouded by his African excursion, suggests possible development as a character, but the playwright drops him unceremoniously after a couple of brief appearances.
Except for a sporadically lapping pace, director M. Burke Walker has done relatively well with Mathews’s text, particularly as regards Marcus, in the person of J. Kennedy, who, as James Kennedy, earned a strongly positive reputation in both London and Dublin.
“Communion” marks Kennedy’s second New York stage experience, the first having taken place in the Irish Repertory Theatre’s production of “Peg O’My Heart.”
In Kennedy’s hands, Marcus is witty and compelling, with an ever-present undercoating of sadness and loss.
In the difficult, restricted role of Jordan, Ean Sheehy is an extraordinary aspect of the Origin’s fine production. With relatively few lines to speak, the young actor makes an almost distressingly powerful impression, contributing an absolutely credible portrait of a young life sputtering out as we watch.
Barbara Sims’s Martha is another of director Walker’s puzzles. At least a bit too young for the role, Sims, in her first scene, could pass for a visiting nurse, rather than someone who actually lives in that suburban Dublin residence.
The always welcome Dubliner Colin Lane makes a subtly shattered Irish missionary, a character not all that different, in one or two aspects, from Father Jack in Brian Friel’s “Dancing at Lughnasa.”
The Origin Theatre Company, whose best-known previous production was Enda Walsh’s one-man drama, “Misterman,” which starred the troupe’s producer, George C. Heslin, at the Irish Arts Center a few seasons ago, is to be commended for running the risk of doing difficult plays and not playing it safe.