Young blood

David Ozanich’s “The Lightning Field” was named the best play in the recently completed 9th annual New York International Fringe Festival and earned, on the basis of the award, a few added performances at Flea Theater at 41 White St., South of Canal, of which four remain.
“The Lightening Field”, which runs about 80 minutes, will play tonight at 9.00, and then Monday, the 26th at 7.00, and finally, Tuesday and Wednesday evenings, the 27th and 28th, both at 9:00.
There appears to be a strong possibility that director Jared Coseglia’s well-paced production of Ozanich’s powerful four character play will return in a month or so for a regular off-Broadway run, in which case it will almost certainly be the making of H. Clark, a gifted young actor whose participation is the core of “The Lightening Field.”
Clark, who is sometimes billed as H. Ryan Clark, plays Sam, a New York-based veterinary surgeon in his early 30s, who with his younger lover, Andy, well played by Cory Grant, embarks on a trip to the New Mexico desert to see the art installation which gives the play its title.
The work, created by Walter De Maria, described in the play’s program as a “land artist,” actually exists, made up of 400 20-foot steel poles, separated 220 feet apart, covering an area of one mile by one kilometer. A cabin accommodating up to six guests is available for a 24-hour viewing period, provided the visitors, who are afforded cooking privileges, restrict themselves to vegetarian meals.
Sam and Andy take along Sam’s veterinarian father and Andy’s giddy mother, both divorced, and, in the course of their visit to the site, the lovers come to realize that they, and their relationship, contain the seeds of the faults and problems which had wrecked their parents’ marriages, and, to an extent, their lives as well.
The lanky, articulate Clark, scruffily bearded for his “Lightning Field” role, brings an amazing gravitas to his character, somehow making the audience invest a vastly greater measure of sympathy and compassion into Sam’s plight than would have been possible if the role had been cast with a less compelling actor.
Visitors are lured to De Maria’s New Mexico installation in the hope that lightning will actually strike, while they’re there granting his sculpture the ideal visual charge for which he had initially designed the work.
There are, of course, differing varieties of lightning, metaphorical as well as actual, and Ozanich’s play concerns itself with both kinds.
Meanwhile, the Irish Repertory Theatre’s triumphant staging of Brian Friel’s “Philadelphia, Here I Come!” ending its long and admired run with Sunday’s matinee performance, has gained a new and heightened level of achievement due, for the most part, to the recasting of one of the resonant and deeply moving play’s central roles.
When Ciaran O’Reilly’s perceptive version of “Philadelphia” opened at the Rep, the Mayo-born Tim Ruddy, vastly experienced in Ireland, made his New York stage debut as Ned, the roughest, most thuggish and, eventually, most wounded of the three friends who pay a call on the play’s protagonist, Gareth O’Donnell, on the night before his departure for America.
Two weeks ago, Ruddy took over the role of Gar when Michael Fitzgerald, who had previously played the part, had to leave the show when its run was extended, due to a previous commitment in Dublin.
Ruddy, who, as Gar, wears his humanity and his compassion almost like a second skin, seems, along with the Rep’s wonderful cast, to have clarified and heightened this production of the play that made playwright Friel famous forty years ago into a new and rarified realm.
The unpretentious “Philadelphia,” probably the Donegal playwright’s most frequently performed work, seems, when it’s done as well as this resonant and eloquent staging, completely worthy of being ranked with the very finest English-language plays of our time, slotting Friel’s value just a touch or two below, say, Williams, Miller, O’Casey and perhaps Tom Stoppard.
In his 70s, the productive and inventive Friel, who has, according to reports, recently been ill, seems entirely worthy of a Nobel Prize for Literature. It is, regrettably, a prize he will almost certainly never win, only in part because another Irishman, the splendid Seamus Heaney, was awarded it so recently.
In the meantime, “Philadelphia, Here I Come!” goes on and on, as fresh and as insightful as it was on the day it faced its first audience, providing a challenge to which excellent actors such as Tim Ruddy can rise with style, power and grace.
Unfortunately, the Irish Rep’s inspired production, even richer and deeper than it was when it opened, will be only a memory after Sunday, when he has to make way for the Irish Rep’s musical version of “Beowulf”, which opens officially on Oct. 16, after a string of preview performances.
Another decided virtue of “Philadelphia” in its final few performances is the work Michael Mellamphy is doing, making his Irish Rep debut as Ned, the role Tim Ruddy vacated when he took on the part of Gar, the lonely shopkeeper’s son about to leave Ballybeg, the town Brian Friel created and populated, to make a slightly shaky departure for America.
The sturdy Mellamphy strikes precisely the right note as the insecure bully, and when, on an impulse, he shows his true feeling at the loss of a friend, he is suddenly very deeply touching.
A strong argument could be made that the Rep’s production of Friel’s “Philadelphia, Here I Come!” is the finest, strongest and most rewarding offering on any New York stage at the moment. Alas, that moment is brief, with the show vanishing into the mists of memory on the 25th.
And, like H. Clark, Tim Ruddy is an actor to treasure. Twenty-five blocks north of the Irish Rep, a flawed but valuable work, “The Fallen 911,” is offering an extremely promising performance by yet another unfamiliar Irish-American actor, Timothy Davis.
The play, by Robert Marese, was first produced a year ago, in honor of the third anniversary of the destruction of the World Trade Towers.
Since then, the play, which has at its center two young Irish-Americans, one a lawyer from Sheepshead Bay, and the other a fireman from Bay Ridge, both caught up in the tragic events of Sept. 11, has been fairly extensively rewritten, and two of its four characters have been recast, one positively, the other perhaps not.
Marese’s play is pretty much what it always was, an extended one-act with a solid, compassionate center, and a weak, rather overly sentimental framing device.
The production’s greatest asset, now as a year ago, is the exceptional performance being given by Davis, playing the Brooklyn-born firefighter, Terry Rourke, who comes to the aid of a not-entirely-likeable lawyer, Michael Sinclair, trapped by a fallen girder which has shattered his leg and rendered him unable to move.
The first production of “The Fallen 9/11” took place at the Producers Club, in a space with overhead pipes and girders which allowed Davis, a personal trainer by profession, to display his athleticism, scrambling over and around the modest set like a monkey.
The new staging, at Theatre 317, an auditorium run by the Salvation Army on West 47th Street, has a redesigned, more elaborate setting which serves Marese’s text but, unfortunately, doesn’t give Davis the physical opportunities the earlier production did.
Nevertheless, “The Fallen 9/11” lets him shine as a working-class Irishman from Brookyln, confronting desperate circumstances.
Even with the physical constrictions of the new version, Davis is utterly convincing and endlessly compelling.
What Marese has attempted is a form of modern miracle play, and despite arguable success where his goal is concerned, writes well for actors, and has provided Davis in particular with a solid part to play. Because the Sallies don’t allow Sunday performances, “The Fallen 9/11” will close on Saturday night.
Any Off-Broadway season that showcases actors as promising as H. Clark, Tim Ruddy and Timothy Davis is a solid indicator of good things to come in the theater’s future.