On the Aisle: Despairing troika

Mark O’Rowe doesn’t write the sort of plays that require doorknobs, coffee pots, recliners, or for that matter, wallpaper.
What he does write, at least this far in his promising career, are scabrous, wrenching, insightful monologues, two or three to a play, as profane as they are poetic, and as demanding of their audiences as they are devastating and distinctive.
O’Rowe’s “Howie the Rookie,” done at P.S. 122 in January 2001, and recently revived by he Irish Arts Center, called for two actors, one on either side of the intermission, each alone on stage, telling a tale which, eventually, integrates into something resembling a single, cohesive narrative.
Now, the young author’s new play, “Crestfall,” at Theater C at the new stage complex whose name is also its address, 59E59, in a lamentably brief run, ending this Sunday, deploys three actresses, mainly working at soul-scouring fever pitch, to tell a tale of moral and physical abuse in the imaginary town that gives the work its title.
The play’s American premiere, intelligently and unsparingly directed by George C. Heslin, is a co-production of the Origin theatre company, of which Heslin is artistic director, and Dublin’s Guna Nua Theatre Company.
First to face the audience from her position on designer Lex Liang’s multi-level setting is Olive Day, played by Niall Toibin’s gifted actress daughter, Fiana, decked out in what looks like a leather dominatrix outfit, complete with balance-defying spike heels.
Toibin’s Olive has the worst of it, in a way, as any actor called upon to open an O’Rowe play is likely to have, since the writer’s initial moments tend to function as a kind of Chinese puzzle, offering bizarre characters, mistifying situations and fantastic entities which may or may not be clarified and identified by the monologues which follow.
The second speaker, for example, Alison Ellis, rendered with an appealing poignant crispness by Barbara J. Spence, turns out to be the semi-frigid wife of the overweight gentleman with whom Olive is having, but decidedly not enjoying a sexual encounter in the previous scene.
Alison resents her husband’s dalliances, but only to a degree, since part of her blames his straying on her own reluctance to accommodate his more elaborate sexual wishes. She seems, in a way, less repelled by her spouse’s fleshly grossness than Olive had been, but then, she’s had more time to become accustomed to it all, the bouncing, sweating corpulence and so on.
Last to appear is Tilly McQuarrie, delivered by Mari Howells, dressed in a modified gothic get-up and blatant make-up, her abundant hair haystacked over one shoulder. The youngest member of O’Rowe’s worn, abused and despairing female troika, the street-wise Tilly is, to her own eventual sorrow, the most savagely streetwise individual to be encountered in “Crestfall.”
She has, as well, some of the playwright’s roughest terrain to cross, dragging an increasingly stupefied audience behind her. Tilly’s tale includes the most pungent collision-to-date involving O’Rowe’s penchant for obscenity and his sporadic addiction to fantasy.
Tilly’s grossout moment involves a dog with three eyes, the third being located somewhere near the end of the snout of the animal, a creature to whom reference has been made earlier on in “Crestfall.”
The slim 59E59 programme says, simply, “Place: Crestfall,” but in director Heslin’s able hands, the overall feeling is strongly Dublinesque, working class and below.
The director’s time-and-place achievement is all the more striking in face of the fact that his three actresses have extremely divergent backgrounds, something which is undetectable in their onstage work.
Toibin is, of course, Irish-born, but Spence is an American, while Howells is Welsh.
Liang’s stage set places O’Rowe’s cast, for much of the work’s intermissionless 80-minute duration, in a position in which the players’ footwear is more or less at eye-level with spectators seated in the first row or two of the tiny auditorium.
At the audience’s feet, the designer has studded his set with items mentioned once or more in the body of the text, a wooden-handled revolver, a broken child’s toy, various items of discarded clothing, and so forth.
The things tucked into the set’s lowest segment can, if the audience is playing relatively close attention shed light on the frequently funny, often profane, sometimes even heartbreakingly moving events being reported just above.
Like Conor McPherson, who, by now, is probably too mature and well-established for the term “promising” to fit, O’Rowe is fascinated by the possibilities of monologue, perhaps even overly so.
He is capable, however, of writing material involving more than a single performer at any given moment, a fact which should be completely clear to any fortunate enough to have seen the vastly underrated film “Intermission,” a year or so ago.
The screenplay, an O’Rowe original, directed by John Crowley, provided richly amusing opportunities for actors to turn in outstanding work, which Colm Meaney, Colin Farrell, Cillian Murphy and Brian F. O’Byrne, among others, did in abundance, with particular emphasis on Meaney, giving what may well be his best performance ever.
Anyone even remotely interested in Irish writing and acting would do well to rent the wonderfully entertaining “Intermission ,” a fine serio-comedy which, alas, never found the American audience it deserved.
At least for now, the immensely talented O’Rowe is apparently fixated by the monologue form, which he utilized in his first produced play, “Rundown,” which was given its world premiere by director Heslin’s Origin Theatre Company, the force behind the current staging of “Crestfall.”
In “Howie the Rookie,” O’Rowe dreamed up a revenge plot in which a gang of Dublin thugs seek to get even with an individual who has, they believe, infected their ringleader with a case of scabies passed on through a mattress.
The three-eyed canine of “Crestfall,” a reference of near-classical resonance, may be the demonic O’Rowe’s attempt to see how far he can go without completely derailing his audience.
Indeed, at a press preview of the show, two rather crass-seeming couples lurched out in protest, one pair after each of the first two monologues, in both cases crashing into an actress also attempting to navigate an exit, albeit one designed by director Heslin.
The distaff member of the second couple even returned for her umbrella a bit after actress Howells had started in on Tilly McQuarrie’s story. To the performer’s credit, she soldiered on, unfazed.
Mark O’Rowe may take a bit of getting used to, but he’s worth it, and so is “Crestfall.”