With no red carpet and no glare of flashbulbs, one of the year’s glitzier events unfurls tastefully at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin on Sunday night. Steve Buscemi, the Brooklyn-born star of Reservoir Dogs, The Sopranos and Fargo, joins his pal Aidan Quinn, the busy Irish-American actor, for a reading of Sam Shepard’s 2009 play Ages of the Moon. Though some way off a full production, the presentation fairly buzzes with humour and emotion.
Those who keep watch on the trade papers will have had an eye out for particular high-profile American visitors. Buscemi is in town to shoot season two of Wednesday, Netflix’s Addams Family spin-off, and, sure enough, Tim Burton, director and executive producer, turns up to view his star in theatrical action.
Minutes before curtain up there’s an audible murmur as Jenna Ortega, who plays the titular mope in Wednesday, takes her seat beside Burton. The two recently returned from premiering Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, the smash-hit gothic sequel, at Venice International Film Festival. First the Lido. Now Abbey Street.
The reading is a one-off as part of the Abbey’s Love at First Sight season. Caitríona McLaughlin, artistic director of the theatre, invites distinguished actors to select a role they have always wanted to perform and then gathers a cast to read the play in question. There is little rehearsal. There is no dedicated set. The season kicked off with Fiona Shaw in Stefano Massini’s 7 Minutes. Quinn chose Shepard’s two-hander and then brought the idea to Buscemi. Confirmation of his appearance arrived only last week.
“He and Aidan have a long-standing friendship,” McLaughlin tells The Irish Times. “And Steve was over here filming. From the beginning we knew we wanted Steve to do it and that Steve, we thought, was available to do it. But he couldn’t commit until he had a written schedule from the film company. So, even though we knew he was doing it, we couldn’t necessarily say he was doing it – just in case their schedule changed and we had to replace him last minute.”
It must be an emotional experience to bring back a play that had its world premiere in this very space. Seán McGinley and Stephen Rea, who originated the roles, later brought that production to New York, where Quinn first caught it.
“He always remembered seeing it in New York, and he thought a lot about it since,” McLaughlin says. “So it was really lovely to think the Abbey still has those resonances and sits in people’s imagination in that way. That’s what we aspire to.”
Ages of the Moon is ideally suited to such treatment. The stage directions, read by a company member at stage left, tell us that two chairs sit upon a domestic porch. Quinn and Buscemi are seated in them as we begin. One of the three shelves from Colin Richmond’s set for the current production of Lady Gregory’s Grania serves as the porch. The rows of reeds also suit the piece nicely. (It is just as well the theatre wasn’t dealing in, say, ruined tenements for a Seán O’Casey play.) We miss some spectacular business with a malfunctioning ceiling fan, but much of the rest of the drama is still in place.
The piece is in the tradition of two-bickering-men plays that stretches from the first act of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot through Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story and on to David Mamet’s American Buffalo. Ames (Quinn) seems to be in trouble with his wife and has summoned his old chum Byron (Buscemi) for booze, conversation and, perhaps, an eclipse of the moon.
As is the way in such things, no story can be entirely trusted and no motivation taken for granted. Did Ames really meet Roger Miller, writer of King on the Road, on his honeymoon? Was Byron there to induce a moment of havoc?
It is a funny pretzel-twisted game that doesn’t outstay its welcome. The real wonder here is how, with so little preparation, Buscemi and Quinn give the impression of complete familiarity with text and character. No doubt certain theatrical tricks are in play – Buscemi employs a wobbly vowel to suggest searching for the next word – but one is still left longing for the full production this exercise could generate.
We do not yet know what the next reading in Love at First Sight will be.
“One of the tricks is a lot of the people we’ve asked have conflicting diaries,” McLaughlin says. “Because maybe they’re in a film or a TV series or something. So we have to wait until they get their schedule before they’ll commit.”
Jenna Ortega looks to have had a good time.
