-Michael Toscano

 

The most Irish place to be around here this St. Patrick’s Day may well turn out to be the Church Street Theatre, where a lively production of The Playboy of the Western World is being presented by the Keegan Theatre.

 

Playboy, the J.M. Synge comedy with dark undertones, caused riots at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre when it first opened in 1907.  Things have calmed down since then in the audience, but there is still plenty of excitement on stage as a tightly knit ensemble wallows in Synge’s flamboyantly musical dialogue.

Yes, wallows is the correct word, as the denizens of the impoverished and rather wild northwest coast of Ireland rapidly spill sentences rotund with extravagantly crafted blarney, all in a rich brogue.

 

One has to adjust ears accustomed to everyday English, which seems sterile and weak by comparison. On opening night, much of the dialogue in the first few scenes was lost to blurry brogues, much of it dribbling from the mouths of characters brim-full of drink.

 

But either the actors eventually slowed down or audience ears sped up and learned to decipher the dense dialect, and the ornate beautify of Synge’s wordplay could eventually be savored.

 

This is a quirky tale of Christy Mahon (played by Carlo Bustamante), a lightly befuddled young man who wanders into a village declaring he has just killed his bully of a father with a blow to the head.

He is immediately cast as a folk hero, and his combination of good looks and apparent lack of guile makes him especially alluring to the lasses and ladies alike.

 

Because the villagers treat him as a hero, Pegeen (Helen Pafumi), a lovelorn but feisty barmaid, and the crafty Widow Quin (Maggie Bush) compete for his attention and affections rather than turning him over to the police.

 

But when the supposedly dead father, Old Mahon (Kevin Adams), stumbles into the same pub – bloody and slightly dazed, but certainly not dead --- Christy’s fortunes change, and the fickle nature of hero worship is exposed.

 

Played strictly for laughs in the first act, but with a darker, more complex second act, this production of Playboy successfully displays Synge’s insight into the petty illusions that humans conjure up to avoid dealing with everyday misery.

 

Director Mark Rhea has taken a few liberties, both with the script and with the inclusion of some sprightly sight gags, but the gamble pays of nicely.  For example, he puts the playwright on the stages several times, with actor Mark Adams speaking to the audience and using comments taken from a preface Synge wrote for a printed version of the play.

 

This helps frame the story and its themes, and makes it clear that the tale springs from an imaginative mind. The stark realism of Irish theatre of the era is not to be expected.

 

Rhea’s directing is steady and his cast ably conveys a nuanced atmosphere of both humor and tragedy. The energy created by the physical comedy of some early sequences is smoothly transformed into several blood-chilling and dark scenes of beautifully choreographed violence later.

 

Skillful acting
The actors never mug; they play the comedy as straight as the drama, and allow the playwrights’ language to weave its spell.

 

Bustamante creates a goofy young man who is often baffled by what happens around him. At the same time, he retains the considerable animal charm that makes the female swooning in his presence believable.

 

Christy, unsure of the reaction he will get when he first tells of his deed, soon grows comfortable with the adulation and becomes something of a braggart, embellishing what he thinks is the murder with each retelling.

 

Pafumi’s Pegeen and Bush’s Widow Quin are both formidable in their own way. Christy is hardly a match for either of them, when all is said (and re-said) and finally done.

 

Pafumi is simultaneously brassy and vulnerable, while Bush brings to life a woman who can barely contain the repressed passions beneath her cunning mask of a face.  She reveals a dash of unexpected poignancy near the end of the first act, allowing us to see some profound unease beneath the seductive posing.

 

Kevin Adams may actually be the audience favorite, snarling and stomping around as the battered but lusty old man who can’t seem to ever exit the pub without first planting a robust kiss square on Widow Quin’s full lips. Each of the remaining supporting roles is played with color and charm by Rhea’s handpicked cast.

 

The solid and meticulously detailed pub interior designed by George Lucas is both realistic and a bit fanciful. Its grime and mean aspect speak of the grinding poverty of this region, and one can almost smell the stale spilled ale and the reek of old tobacco.

 

But it also seems a place where spirits can soar on the slenderest hope, and the beauty of language can be explored while the mundane details of a hardscrabble existence are ignored.

 

The good theater patrons of Dublin a century ago were aghast at the depiction of their coastal brethren as drunken, bumptious heathens who casually exalt a man for murder and just as easily turn on him. They were also annoyed by Synge’s bending of realism.

 

But we don’t have to worry about any of those things and can just enjoy this playboy and his fated encounter with some merry peasants.