Projecting success

He groups Offaly, Longford and Leitrim in this category, calling them ?places you drive through, without ever taking very much notice of them.?
The 36-year-old playwright and former actor may tend to sound dismissive about the area that shaped him, but Offaly still exerts a palpable influence on him and his work. The town where he was born, as the eldest of six children of a prosperous local entrepreneur, is Edenderry, and the first two syllables became the name of his first full-length play.
That title, ?Eden,? has an implicit double meaning. There?s the writer?s home town, of course, but since the play is about a terminally wounded marriage, there?s a possible biter irony in the name, because the union in which he story?s unhappily married partners, Billy and Breda, live is anything but an edenic or paradisiacal state of earthly bliss.
?When I was growing up, Edenderry was a town with a population of four or five thousand people, with one long main street, a square where the town hall was, and around the edges, housing estates forming something resembling suburbs,? O?Brien said recently from his home in Dublin.
Edenderry has seen considerable change since those days. ?It?s the third biggest town in Offaly,? O?Brien said, ?and about ten thousand people live there now, because, since its only 37 miles from Dublin, a lot of people commute to work and back, and there are busses every hour.?
When the writer was a youngster, his father had a considerable financial interest in the town, running, among other things, the movie theater.
Having such easy access to a cinema had a considerable effect on O?Brien as he grew up, so much so that his second play, which soon goes into rehearsals at Dublin?s Abbey Theatre, is titled ?Savoy,? after the theater?s name.
The new play, obviously, takes place in Edenderry, and deals with three men, Pod, Steve and Dave, who have just attended a wake held in ?the old Savoy cinema,? and have lingered in the empty theater to ?relive past glories, confront present disappointments and face future uncertainties.?
The director of ?Savoy,? will be Conall Morrison, and one of the three actors involved will be John Olohan, whose wife, Catherine Byrne, is currently appearing in ?Eden? at the Irish Rep.
The O?Brien family was, in the playwright?s words,? the moneyed people of the town.?
Having the Savoy Theatre in the family exposed O?Brien and his friends to a considerable range of cinematic influences.
?There were children?s matinees on Saturdays, where they?d show movies that were considered ?suitable for young people,? he said. ?But if there wasn?t anything available that was thought to be a kiddies? film, they?d show what they happened to have played the previous night.?
That?s how Eugene O?Brien happened to see the late director Sam Peckinpah?s classic Western, ?The Wild Bunch,? a bloody film, when he wasn?t even into his teens. The impression it made on him was indelible.
?That film opens with a bunch of little kids hunkered down in a circle, torturing a scorpion to death,? he recalled. ?They?d burn it and poke at it, and the film would cut to the members of the wild bunch riding into town, getting together to form the gang to do whatever it was they were planning to do.?
O?Brien recalls gentler films as well, since not every Saturday was an occasion of violence.
?I loved ?the Sound of Music,? ? he said, ? and ?Snow White,? and a lot of adventure films about Sinbad and Jason and people like that.?
The writer and his friends also picked up a few ideas about sex in their afternoons at the Savoy.
?I remember a film called ?Rancho Deluxe,? ? he said, ?a kind of modern Western in which Jeff Bridges took somebody to a barnyard and made fairly graphic love. We?d never been exposed to anything of the sort and it definitely made an impression. They made love out of doors, and we?d certainly never seen anything like that before.?
Being the son of a prosperous businessman who eventually made additional money in real estate put O?Brien in line to go to the best schools available.
One of them was Clongowes Wood College, which he calls ?the Eton of Ireland.?
?It was the place where the captains and the kings of the future were supposed to go,? he said. ?Among other people, James Joyce went there to be taught by the Jesuits.?
Clongowes Wood College, however, wasn?t destined to be part of O?Brien?s life. ?It was, of course, a boarding school,? he said, ?and I was sent there when I was 11, going on 12. I lasted two months, and then I ran away and thumbed my way home.?
Undaunted, his parents returned him to the school, where he lasted another two months before he ran away again. ?This time, my mother and father gave up and didn?t make me go back there again,? he said. ?I couldn?t stand the regimentation of the place, and the elitism.?
O?Brien attended the local secondary school and then went to Rathmines College, where he majored in communications. ?I was mad about the idea of making movies,? he said, ?but I spent more time in front of the camera than behind it.?
It was in Rathmines that he started acting, and he subsequently enrolled at the Oscar School of Acting, which had been founded by the late actor Chris O?Neill and his brother Vincent.
The first writing O?Brien did included an hour-long monologue he called ?America 87,? which grew out of a trip he and a pal made to the United States, visiting New York and then crossing the country by bus to see California via Las Vegas. Along the way, the travelers had one specific mission.
?We wanted to go to Lawrence, Kan., to pay a call on William Burroughs,? he said. Amazingly enough, they actually found the renegade writer, who frightened the boys by greeting them with a pistol in his hand.
O?Brien performed ?America 87? in pubs and small theaters around Dublin for a while. Four or five years later, in the early 1990s, he wrote a second solo piece, ?Checking for Squirrels,? which contained the seeds of some of the ideas, not to mention the characters, that blossomed into ?Eden.?
The narrator of ?Checking for Squirrels? is Eoin, a salesman who travels Irish towns selling portable putting greens, and who, in ?Eden,? encounters the lonely, unloved heroine, Breda, and seduces her with gentleness and affection.
O?Brien wrote ?Eden? in late 1999 and early 2000. ?I wanted to explore the loneliness I?d seen in couples in my home town,? he said.
Some of the details are based in truth, however. One of O?Brien?s aunts confided to him that she?d gained weight and that she feared her sexual relationship with her husband would suffer as a result.
The playwright used the detail when he wrote about Breda, who goes on a rigid diet in a desperate attempt to regain Billy?s love. In ?Eden,? Breda succeeds in losing weight. O?Brien?s aunt had no such luck.
As he was developing as a writer, O?Brien made a living of sorts as an actor. For a year-and-a-half, he was part of the cast of the popular soap opera ?Fair City.? ?I played a mad student named Ciaran,? he said.
The first actual money his writing ever earned him came as a fee he received for writing a radio play, ?The West,? for RTE in 1995.
O?Brien has acted fairly extensively on film and television, but he hasn?t acted since 1996 and he has neither the passion nor the inclination to act in the future.
Among his fondest memories, however, is the experience of performing in a tremendously successful stage adaptation of Patrick Kavanagh?s 1948 novel, ?Tarry Flynn.?
Produced by the Abbey Theatre and directed by Conall Morrison, who will soon be handling O?Brien?s ?Savoy,? the show transferred to London?s Royal National Theatre after its sold-out Dublin run.
In ?Tarry Flynn,? O?Brien had a rich scene with the late Pauline Flanagan, a fine actress familiar to audiences at the Irish Rep.
?I was a process server,? he said, ?and I had a scene with Pauline, who played the hero?s mother. She chatted me up to find out who might be in trouble.?