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A CurtainUp Review
Wife to James Whelan
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Did I show myself there in a foolish light? — James
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Shawn Fagan and Rosie Benton
(Photo: Carol Rosegg) |
Here's another thank you to the Mint Theatre's artistic director Jonathan Bank for spending fifteen years not only searching for but actually resurrecting and producing lost treasures of dramatic literature. So, with that aside, I am able to respond most enthusiastically to his fine staging and direction of Wife of James Whelan by the regrettably obscured Irish playwright Teresa Deevy.
A close-knit group of working class, life-long friends shares camaraderie as well as an affection for Kilbeggan, the small Irish town (given an impressive brick and stone ambiance by set designer Vicki R. Davis) where they have grown up and worked together. Some express their slightly ingenuous feelings, however, toward James Whelan (Shawn Fagan), a cocky, feisty, self-assured young man who has just been singled out from amongst a dozen young men and selected for an excellent job that will take him to Dublin.
The news of his imminent departure doesn't sit well with Nan (Janie Brookshire,) the pretty girl he loves and who loves him. Nan has her doubts about James's assurance that he will return in six months with enough money to marry her. Her feelings are conflicted not only by the arrival in town of a gentle young man Jack (Thomas Matthew Kelley,) who is showing her some attention, but also by two of the local blokes, Tom Carey (Aiden Redmond) and Bill McGafferty (Jeremy S. Holm) who wouldn't mind if she looked their way. Looking upon all this romantic maneuvering and wavering is the lovely, slightly older, Kate (Rosie Benton) whose true feelings for James are consigned to friendship.
Act II begins with James coming back to Kilbeggan after seven years, a successful business man. His plans to open a bus company in town includes the hiring of his old friends as well as Nan who has since become an impoverished widow with a 4 year-old child. Things go terribly awry when Nan does something foolish out of desperation.
As you might expect in an Irish play, there is plenty of talk, much of it witty and snappy. There is little room for subtlety as James, in particular as the power-driven employer, lets his volatile emotions loose and his fists fly. As a playwright, Deevy seems infinitely more concerned with the contrariness and arbitrariness of human nature than with the way a story might naturally develop. The dramatic scope of this play may be conspicuously narrow, but not the broad emotional spectrum through which we see and get know each character. It's good to report that the actors, many of whom are new to the Mint, are giving richly realized performances.
Although the play bridges seven years, there are basically only two incidents that bring a life-altering change to the characters: James rise to success as the head of an expanding business and Nan's descent into penury. Otherwise we are completely invested in the developing and deepening connections between the characters. They may not change their nature, but they are seen as increasingly vulnerable and subject to behaving irrationally.
.Fagan may or may not have modeled his performance as the bossy and often brutally brusque James Whelan after the kind of nervously edgy, tough-as-nails character that James Cagney played so often in films. But, he is, as are the other characters around whom his life revolves, distinctly calibrated to surprise even himself. The play gets an unexpected jolt when Nora Keane (Liv Rooth), the aggressively flirtatious daughter of a local wealthy businessman, makes a play for the resistant James. How her intrusion impacts on the never completely resolved relationship between James and Nan or, for that matter, with Kate (an especially touching performance by Ms Benton) triggers a revelatory denouement.
Brookshire earns, as she should, our sympathy as the long-suffering Nan whose life has taken a few unfortunate turns. John Fletcher has some wonderfully funny moments as Kate's younger brother Apollo, who only manages to irk his employer when his only aim is to please. Redmond makes an outstanding impression as Tom, the bus driver whose life-long infatuation with Nan may pay off some day. There's always a place for a trouble-maker like Bill and Holm handles that assignment with assurance.
Despite the fact that Deevy (1894 – 1963) succumbed to total deafness while still a university student, her talent was recognized by The Abbey theatre in Dublin during the first half of the 1930s when they produced the first six of her seven plays. If her early success did not secure for her a future as a renowned playwright, she would at least leave a small canon of plays that are undoubtedly ready for reappraisal. We are grateful to Bank for his discovery and deliverance of Wife to James Whelan and the care and integrity with which it is being performed and presented.
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Wife to James Whelan By Teresa Deevy Directed by Jonathan Bank Cast: Aidan Redmond (Tom Carey), Jeremy S. Holm (Bill McGafferty), Janie Brookshire (Nan Bowers), Rosie Benton (Kate Moran), Shawn Fagan (James Whelan), Thomas Matthew Kelley (Jack McClinsey), John Fletcher (Apollo Moran), Liv Rooth (Nora Keane). Set Design: Vicki R. Davis Costume Design: Martha Hally Lighting Design: Nicole Pearce Sound Design: Jane Shaw Running Time: 2 hours 20 minutes including two intermissions Mint Theatre, Third floor at 311 West 43rd Street (212) 315 – 0231 Performances: Tuesday through Thursday at 7 PM, Friday at 8 PM, Saturday at 2 PM & 8 PM, and Sunday at 2 PM. Tickets ($55.) Previews began 07/29/10 Opened 08/23/10 Ends 10/03/10 Review by Simon Saltzman based on performance 08/18/10 |
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