Theater Review Irish Rep deftly handles an old-fashioned crowd pleaser

By Joseph Hurley

THE COUNTRY BOY, by John Murphy. Directed by Charlotte Moore. Starring Dara Coleman, Valorie Hubbard, Aideen Kelly, Heather O’Neill, Ciaran O’Reilly and James A. Stephens. At the Irish Repertory Theatre, 132 East 22nd St., NYC. Through April 2.

An aging father is terminally at odds with his young son, unable and unwilling to express his affection, even as the boy is preparing to depart for America on a journey from which he may well never return, at least not while the older man is still alive.

If that brief description brings Brian Friel’s enduring "Philadelphia, Here I Come!" to mind, the response is understandable, but erroneous.

The play in question is "The Country Boy," by a now forgotten playwright from Charlestown, Co. Mayo, John Murphy. Written in 1950 and produced a year later, it predates Friel’s "Philadelphia" by nearly six seasons. Murphy, who died in 1998, is so little remembered that, in addition to being confused at times with Galway dramatist Tom Murphy, his name isn’t even listed in the Oxford Companion to Irish Literature.

The significance of the superficial resemblance between Friel’s famous 1964 emigration comedy and Murphy’s vastly more simplistic work is that both plays reflect an earnest concern with the viable pain inevitably associated with a tiny country forced to surrender much of its successive young generations to a strange and distant land.

The U.S. in general and New York in particular still magnetize youthful Irish men and women, but their nation’s prosperity has combined with the availability of reasonable air fares to produce a vastly altered situation, one that serves to make plays like "The Country Boy" appear even more antiquated than they actually are.

Nevertheless, applying a little compassion, it’s easy to understand why the Abbey’s staging of Murphy’s play stands as one of the venerable old Dublin theater’s biggest hits of the late 1950s.

The brisk, energetic production currently on view at the Irish Repertory Theatre is as cozily comfortable as the little playhouse on West 22nd Street itself, is, and, if the reaction of the audience at one Saturday evening preview performance is to be taken seriously, it should provide the company with a genuine crowd pleaser, albeit a decidedly old-fashioned one.

Curly Maher, aged about 25, is planning to leave his family’s small, hard-pressed County Mayo farm in favor of a new life in America, repeating the pattern established by his brother, Eddie, somewhat over a decade earlier. The present tense of the play is the summer of 1959, and Eddie, accompanied by his coarse-grained American wife, Julie, has, for reasons never made entirely clear in the text, come back to Mayo to escort his younger brother on his trans-Atlantic journey.

The brothers’ parents, Tom and Mary Kate, live contained, cautious lives, coping with the hardships of a farm that, at the best of times, could probably never be termed "comfortable" or "profitable."

Eddie’s American wife is at first painted in much the same tones as the bossy, alcoholic "aunt" who arrives in the second act of Friel’s "Philadelphia," intent on taking the play’s young hero back to America and shaping his life. Murphy’s devouring American female at first appears to be a creature of gross pretension, overquoting the cost of everything she wears in order to make herself, and Eddie in particular, appear more prosperous than turns out to be the case.

An overstuffed little kewpie doll of a woman, she seems to be a vulgar exaggeration of the Irish idea of a rough-hewn American shrew. In the play’s second act, Murphy turns the tables to reveal her as the courageous, long-suffering captive of an alcoholic, virtually unemployable lout of a husband. It is precisely the sort of authorial switch that seems to catch audiences off-guard and to delight them, no matter how frequently they’ve seen this particular theatrical card trick performed.

Murphy’s numbingly conventional play seems architectured specifically to placate Irish audiences of a generation or two ago by administering injections of the theatrical equivalent of Novocain in sufficient strength to convince supposedly undemanding viewers of the postwar period that, no matter how unrewarding their lives might seem, they are nevertheless preferable to the dark mysteries lying beyond the roiling ocean east of Ireland.

At the risk of tipping Murphy’s slender plot, his boy, Curly, stays on the farm, makes peace with his surly, tight-lipped father, and uses the money given him by Eddie for his airfare to buy a ring for the pure, virtuous local girl, Eileen, he’d barely noticed earlier on. Friel’s hero, on the other hand, ventures forth in the face of a decidedly risky future.

If Murphy’s goal was to deliver a kind of bovine reassurance, as seems to be at the very least a distinct possibility, he can be said to have achieved his aims, nicely underscored on every front by the Irish Rep production, directed cleanly and efficiently by the group’s intrepid artistic director, Charlotte Moore, who seems to have made her peace with precisely the sort of antiquatedly soothing domestic comedy her company had undertaken this time out.

The audience settles into the auditorium’s comfortable seats confronted by designer David Raphel’s warmly realistic set, its dappled flooring reflecting the cozy lighting of the farmhouse’s glowing hearth, sufficiently realistic to move one patron to nudge her husband and say, "Look, Pat, there’s a fire, but I think it’s gas."

The whole play, though Pat’s wife didn’t say it, could be dismissed as gas, with the strife between the father and his younger son hinging on nothing more cosmic than the lad’s desire to paint the outhouse red, while the older Maher orders that it be conventionally black.

The mother holds neutral ground in the family struggles, as Irish wives and mothers, particularly women of the rural variety, unfailingly do in this sort of routinized exercise, hoping for the best, but fully prepared to cope should the worst possible scenario present itself.

Just how accurately Moore and the Irish Rep calculated the strengths and weaknesses of "The Country Boy" is abundantly clear before the first actor steps onto the stage. The audience is treated to a little concert of the most lachrymose ballads ever recorded by the greatest of all Irish tenors, John McCormack, precisely the sort of thing cherished when it poured out of the radio positioned on a high shelf in their kitchen.

With its row of country caps hanging on hooks and its frequent references to the Sunday night dances so beloved by Curly and Eileen, and talk of the thatched roof that’s been replaced since Eddie last visited "The Country Boy" is a bland little custard of a play, free of lumps and easily digested by audiences who would prefer not to have their bones rattled by complexity.

The acting, as is almost always the case with the Irish Rep, is beyond reproach, with the rangy, appealing Dara Coleman and the lovely Heather O’Neill as, respectively, Curly and Eileen, and Aideen O’Kelly and James A. Stephens as the weathered farm couple. As the visiting son and daughter-in-law, the Rep’s producing director, Ciaran O’Reilly, and newcomer Valorie Hubbard claw to the core of their characters’ miserable marriage, demonstrating a negative energy that would have done credit to August Strindberg.

David Toser’s costumes are suitable, and, in the case of those worn by actress Hubbard, unusually character-revealing, including one extremely peculiar pair of shoes. The lighting, by Gregory Cohen, provides an attractive and accurate idea of the time and of the sort of weather going on in the world beyond those Mayo farmhouse walls.