New York theatre-goers thrilled and squirmed to the strains of Dublin gore and glory this week as the Abbey Theatre production of Mark O'Rowe's Terminusopened the prestigious Under the Radar festival in downtown Manhattan.
Marking the first trip of an Irish production to the festival, and the first New York outing for an Abbey production in four years, O'Rowe's interlocking verse monologues of modern Dublin, shot through with Faustian myth and pulsing with a surreal violence, made an audible impact on its American audience as gasps and exclamations rang out in the auditorium of the Public Theater.
The shock factor was high, but well met, with the play's cast of Andrea Irvine, Aidan Kelly and Eileen Walsh afterwards greeted with long applause. However, the playwright himself, who also directed the production, was nowhere to be seen, having had to pull out of the evening at the last minute. It was not nerves which hit him - "this guy doesn't do nerves," said Abbey director Fiach Mac Conghail - but a flu which had left him largely bedridden since his arrival in New York the previous day.
Sponsored to the tune of €45,000 by Culture Ireland, the Abbey opening was watched by an Irish delegation including Mac Conghail and literary director Jimmy Fay, as well as Loughlin Deegan, director of the Dublin Theatre Festival, and Laurie Uprichard, director of International Dance Festival Ireland.
As the Under the Radar festival runs concurrently with one of New York's biggest annual arts conferences - the Association of Performing Arts event, to which some 30 Irish arts bodies, also sponsored by Culture Ireland, have travelled - O'Rowe's play will be seen by an audience of producers, directors and tastemakers from around the world, said the festival's founding director, Mark Russell.
Russell has a long-standing relationship with O'Rowe's work, having brought it to New York for the first time in 2001, with an acclaimed production of Howie the Rookie at another innovative downtown venue, PS 122.
Reviews of Terminuswill not appear until next week, but reaction from audience members suggested no great obstacles to comprehension; the New York production was slightly longer than its Dublin predecessor, with the actors working to enunciate every syllable, without losing the kick of the accent or the narrative's frenetic pace.
"The way they inhabited the language was what was amazing about the performances," said producer Nolini Barretto. Chuck Helm, director of the Wexner Centre for Performing Arts in Ohio, spoke of the intense buzz surrounding the production, which will run until January 20th.
Choreographer Jean Butler said it was "exhilarating" to see Irish storytelling unleashed in a modern New York setting. "I could tell who was Irish by what they were laughing at," said Butler, "but I think that the overall thrust of the play was completely enjoyed by everybody, cultural or not."
There was, said Russell, some early uncertainty over whether to tone down or to translate some of the play's particularly Irish or Dublin-centric references, but O'Rowe's script emerged intact, with Dart rides, Garda stations, packets of Mentos and Lockets included. Where the moments of lacerating violence were concerned, there was a little more anxiety, he said. "I never know how it's going to work," he said on Wednesday night. "It's really a delicate show. But if the audience commits to it, it'll take them."
Speaking after the show, Mac Conghail said the audience reaction "felt like a hometown response", and gave encouragement in advance of the Abbey's second trip to the Public, later this year, to give its production of Sam Shepard's Kicking a Dead Horseits US premiere.
Whether the warm "hometown" response for Terminusforetells the response of a bigger hometown depends now on the New York reviews.
In 2004, the last Abbey production in New York - Ben Barnes's centennial Playboy of the Western World- met a lukewarm response; the New York Timesdescribed it as "dolorous" and "dispiritingly grim".
Grim is a word which could also apply to O'Rowe's vision of demons and death-throes in inner-city Dublin, but there are other words blasting out of its furnace as well - when it opened in Dublin last July, critics described the play as "hilarious", "spellbinding", "touching", and "deliriously good".
Mac Conghail and the Abbey will be hoping for a revival of those words on the New York newsstands. As for O'Rowe, it is to be hoped he'll be off the cough Lockets by then.