Revisiting a play I wrote as a very young man is like encountering myself at that pitiable, promising age. I read the words on the page as I might look at his face and wonder: Was I ever so young? And stupid? And talented? How was I this hopeful, and naive?
Because the play is exuberantly messy, heedlessly emotional; the play is funny and angry and sad – often all at once. For all its flaws (and I cannot help but notice many flaws, after so many years) I remember that the play’s wellspring was gratitude, and passion was my method. There is a spark of life in it. I envy the playwright who wrote it.
Who was I when I wrote the play? I was lost. In my rented narrow room above a locksmith in Cork – my flatmates a socialist graduate student from Kerry who refused to replace his missing front tooth (“too bourgeois”), and an art student from Waterford with a motorcycle and frequent late-night visits from his many pretty poseuses – I was scribbling tortured love letters to my future wife in college in Vermont. She wasn’t sure about me yet.
The rain was general all over Ireland. The river Lee was rushing high and turbulent below my window, the quayside frothing with algae and moss that seemed to glow with an almost purple aura. Drunk men slumped along the benches, belting out old IRA songs. Seagulls were shrieking, wheeling, diving in the breakthrough spears of sun. The singing and the rain went on and on ...
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The one place I felt at home was the amateur theatre down the street where I’d been cast in David Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago. And after that a few more plays (and a few of them Irish plays in which I attempted a kind of Irish accent). My new friends in the amateur theatre scene made vivid impressions on me. Some of them would become characters in the play that I was subconsciously preparing to write.
More experienced playwrights would disguise the identities of their models; my intent was to pay homage to my friends, but if the real people who inspired these characterisations are around to see the play today, they might easily – and rightly – take offence. So let this be a belated apology for my literary sins.
Ultimately my characters were iterations of my conflicted young self, for better and for worse.
Why did I think that I was qualified to write a play about the Irish? I’d only just arrived. And why was I here in the first place? I couldn’t really say. I was here to figure out why I was here, why I felt this compulsion “to return”, though I’d never been to Ireland before. I was Irish American but my family almost never spoke about our heritage. They were baffled by my decision to go.
“But we left that country ...” my father said as I stood at the front door with my enormous hiking pack on my shoulders. My father carried within him the immigrant shame of our ancestors. His grandfather left Co Cavan penniless in 1908 at the age of 22 – my age as I boarded the night flight to Shannon – before he found work as a groundskeeper at a Catholic orphanage on Staten Island.
The rest of my family’s Irish forebears had fled the Famine half a century prior and settled in Brooklyn and the Bronx. By the time I was born, the ignominy of Irish poverty had all but vanished, at least for me, and I grew up with the privilege of romanticising my roots.
It wasn’t about shamrocks and Claddagh rings though. Or the Troubles in the North. My obsession felt familial. I read Waiting for Godot when I was 12 years old and didn’t understand it. I didn’t need to. I knew it. I recognised my family’s pathology in the Beckettian psychodrama: our absurdity, our existential stasis, the lyrical vaudeville of our despair.
To say nothing of Yeats, Synge, Joyce, Keane, Friel, Heaney ... These writers lent me an identity that I hadn’t acquired from my actual family, a large but unclose clan riddled with mental illness and abuse, deceit and secrecy. I was fleeing my home by “returning” to Ireland, but I was also searching for another home – an accepting, artistic home. I was searching for my true family.
What I found in the amateur theatre in Cork is a notion that has grown over the years that I have been a playwright into a conviction: to make theatre is to attempt a collaborative miracle similar to familial love. Tolstoy might as well have said it: All happy theatrical productions are alike; each unhappy production is unhappy in its own way.
Both families and plays are impossible to perfect. But if the artists involved serve each other and the endeavour with charity and empathy, with risk and vulnerability, with intelligence and integrity, then the play will offer the audience solace, sanctuary, provocation and inspiration – some of what all happy families provide.
An Irish Play will receive its Irish premiere in April as produced by the Clonmel Theatre Guild in Clonmel, Co Tipperary, 26 years after the play’s initial production at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, when I was a graduate student. The play won the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival’s Mark Twain Comedy Playwriting Award, followed by a few readings with companies in New York City, and productions in Milwaukee and Toronto, before it went the way of most new plays: into obscurity.
Luckily it had been published, and Bea Conner-Pohl, a recent arrival in Ireland from New York, found and read the play and – to my surprise and delight – it spoke to her across the ocean and the years.
I visit Ireland with my wife and daughter when I can, but my awareness of how the country has changed since the mid-’90s is approximate at best. Bea Conner-Pohl is directing, and she tells me that the actors are connecting personally with the play’s themes of gender and race, the American view of the Irish and vice versa. I leave the question of the play’s relevance in their hands.
I won’t be able to attend performances in Clonmel, but this may be for the best. It’s not my play any more. It is the play of that very young man, a play written inexpertly with love and a little madness. I am thankful to the artists who are attempting the collaborative miracle of the play’s revival, as I am thankful to the audiences who will become, for an hour or two, part of the family.
