February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Hughes’s rich, subtle show opens this week at the Culture Project at 45 Bleecker St., a venue that appears to be the place where ranking movie queens become producers, thus far with positive results.
Last season, Meryl Streep presented Sarah Jones’s one-woman venture, “Bridge and Tunnel,” which had a healthy Culture Project run and will appear on Broadway later on this year.
Now there is Angelica Huston, the primary producer of “Belfast Blues,” with an assist by yet another well-known actress, Carol Kane, who is listed as the production’s “contributing director.”
“Belfast Blues” bears the slightly coy subtitle “One wee girl’s story about family, war, Jesus and Hollywood.”
The subtitle is entirely accurate, and perhaps suggests that the material Hughes is dealing with is far from entirely grim, despite the broken walls and coil of deadly razor wire that are part of Jonathan Christman’s simple but eloquent setting.
Hughes, one of five children into a Catholic family living for a time in the notorious West Belfast tenement block, since razed, called the Divis Flats. If her story is a tale of almost Dickensian poverty, she’s not complaining, because, as she puts it, “there were lots of kids around, and everybody was as poor as we were.”
The actress, dressed in black slacks, black shoes, and a black shirt, plays a couple of dozen characters in the course of the swiftly paced 80 minutes it takes to tell her story.
There is her frequently pregnant mother, her stubbornly slow-thinking father, the pill-popping neighbor next door, and the crusty old shopkeeper across the road, among a host of other individuals Hughes remembers from her war-torn childhood.
Her transitions are lightning quick, and her insights are rare and genuine, one nice touch being her memory of the way the Communion wafer sticks to the roof of the mouth. That’s a small touch, but an entirely valid one.
Hughes came perilously close to being named Debbie, in honor of Debbie Reynolds, a favorite of her mother’s. Sheila Hughes, in fact, was fond of crooning “Gold Morning, Good Morning,” a terminally treacly number from “Singin’ in the Rain,” to her newborn daughter.
The perky screen star’s name was avoided when the baby’s father, Eamon, pointed out that there was no Saint Debbie, a loose requirement before the desired name could be officially designated.
Some of Hughes’s recollections are poignant, such as the sound of the body landing near her family’s flat when a despondent man jumped to his death from an upper floor.
For a time, the actress’ family operated an unauthorized shop out of their ground floor apartment, and one of her most resonant memories is of refusing to give a neighbor child a pack of bubble gum on credit one day, only to see his lifeless body, decapitated by a bomb, lying on a stretcher a day later.
Hughes remembers the death of hunger striker Bobby Sands, on May 5, 1981, just as her growing family finally found a house that enabled them to leave the Divis Flats. But the new home was so near to the Peace Line wall that they were in even greater danger than they had been before the move.
The greenish-gray expanse of distressed urban wall that had greeted the audience settling in to see “Belfast Blues” had quickly become a screen on which was projected a stream of brilliantly selected, skillfully arranged images of Belfast during the years when the actress was growing up.
The slide show, in fact, is so excellent that in lesser hands it would threaten to draw attention away from the heartfelt and precise work the actress is doing in front of it. Indeed, Hughes’s concentration and her precision are so intense that her narrative threat is never in danger.
The production’s slim program lists a few sources for the numerous photographs, but no specific credit for their deployment, which is one of the strong points of “Belfast Blues.” Since Christman is identified as “set and lighting designer,” the eloquent and flawlessly timed slide work may well be his, as well.
The sound design by Jonathan Snipes also deserves mention, as does whatever it was actress Kane contributed to the event.
Beyond its obvious meaning, Hughes’s title, “Belfast Blues,” may carry a second significance: a reference to the bright blue eyes that the writer-performer maintains are almost a Belfast benchmark.
An especially clear and expressive pair of them shine out of the spectacularly mobile face of Hughes herself and serve as powerful elements in the warm, unbroken contact she maintains with her audience.
The word “Hollywood” in the play’s subtitle refers to the fact that, as a pre-teen, Hughes auditioned for and got a part in an NBC Movie-of-the-Week, “Children of the Crossfire,” produced and directed by the late George Schaefer.
Getting the role gave Hughes a brief trip to California, not to mention a good measure of grief when, upon her return to Belfast, her chums, predictably enough, accused her of being “stuck up” and “starry.”
Seeing even the brief film clip included in “Belfast Blues,” it’s easy to see why the director chose her out of what was apparently a vast field of applicants.
At that recent, pre-opening matinee, a sightless woman in the audience, guided by her companion, approached Hughes, standing alongside the playing area in a running outfit and said, “I only wish I could have seen you.”
There was no suggestion in the woman’s voice that she felt she had missed any aspect of the performance. What greater tribute could any performer desire?
In a field of mainly mediocre solo shows currently running, Geraldine Hughes’s ‘Belfast Blues” is a genuine standout and richly deserves to repeat the solid run it has already enjoyed in London, Los Angeles and, most recently, Chicago.