By Joseph Hurley
COLIN QUINN, AN IRISH WAKE, starring Colin Quinn. Written by Quinn and Lou DiMaggio. Directed by Bobby Moresco. At the Helen Hayes Theatre, 240 West 44th St. Through Sept. 19.
Some striking alterations have overtaken Colin Quinn’s one-man show, a poignant and personal recollection of an Irish-Catholic boyhood in working-class Brooklyn, since it played at the Irish Arts Center four years ago under the simple title, "An Irish Wake."
Now the show, playing at Broadway’s Helen Hayes Theatre in a limited engagement, has incorporated its creator name into the title. This is understandable, given that since he did the show the last time, Quinn has become famous as the lynchpin of "Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update" segment.
On a perhaps less superficial level, a further change appears to have visited "An Irish Wake." Quinn claims to have reworked perhaps a quarter of the text. The result is a show that projects an astonishingly different tone.
Oddly, Quinn’s show seems darker now, as though in reworking the stories the writer found them less funny, more rueful, and tinged with sadness and regret.
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To be sure, Quinn’s enviable skill at capturing the essence of a personality or an event is still very much in evidence, but the feeling is different on Broadway than it was in the less formal environs of off-Broadway.
Quinn’s world is one of placid acceptance. A churlish neighbor, Jimmy, the self-appointed moral watchdog of the neighborhood, prides himself on knowing, to the penny, the salaries of every public worker in the vicinity, be it the cop, the sanitation man or the schoolteacher, statistics he spews out with deep bitterness, with no prompting required.
Quinn’s monologue, lasting only a little over an hour, is set on the day in 1976 when a much-loved denizen of the neighborhood, Jackie Ryan, unexpectedly died, and the core of the evening is obviously Quinn’s recollections of his adolescence, viewed 20 years later in what appears to have been a form of tranquillity.
Originally, and now, one of the most vibrant ghosts Quinn conjures up is that of Margaret, the self-denying aunt who would, he recalls, "do anything for you, so long as you did nothing for her." It was the martyred Margaret who provided Quinn’s earlier engagement with what is probably still the show’s single most resonant line. "You didn’t go after what you wanted," she said. "That was selfish. You went after what was left."
Even Margaret, the sole female portrait in Quinn’s poignant gallery, somehow seems more sorrowing now than was the case four seasons ago.
Quinn’s powers of observation are acute, although he presents his material with an unornamented directness that somehow stops short of characters fully performed. He appears to be more at home as a writer than as a performer. He is always visibly present in his sketches of the friends, relatives and neighbors whose stories he has selected to tell, ranging from Aidan, an embittered old Irish-born alcoholic, to J.T., a drug addict who has a sexual encounter on what turns out to be his grandmother’s tombstone.
Audiences identifying Quinn with "Saturday Night Live" may come to the Helen Hayes expecting a barrel of laughs, and they may well be disappointed and even a little bit put off by the depth of the material, and even by the regret-filled note struck by so many moments in the brief presentation.
On the other hand, audiences willing to make a slightly dangerous voyage with a singular, resolutely plebian performer will almost certainly be richly rewarded.