Max "Bunny" Sparber

THE WALKER ART CENTER presented Enda Walsh's The Walworth Farce this past week; I presume they did so specifically to make things hard for me. I am only working on two projects now, the first a collection of arts journalistic pieces about The Walker, the second an exploration of my Irish-American identity, including a survey of Irish theater. And so where to put my story about The Walworth Farce?

This sort of taxonomy is exhausting, and I don't have the energy for it. It's like finding a bug that's part seal, part fluoride, and then being asked to find its proper genus. Just thinking about it is wearying, and so to hell with it, it goes under my Irish-American project, but will be labeled as part of my Walker Project. I think this solution is admirable: It's precisely the sort of compromise that makes progress possible.

Anyway, The Walworth Farce, by Enda Walsh. It's a play Walsh wrote for the Druid Theatre Company in Galway, which is not only the first professional theater company to ever have been built in Galway, but is, in fact, the first professional theater company ever to have existed outside of Dublin. When the Druid was first getting off the ground in 1975, it was a bit unusual for an Irish theater, in that its founders were students of theater from NUIG and were steeped in the avant garde theater of Europe and America. Irish theater had, at that time, a long tradition of being somewhat immobile and language-based, consisting of actors fixing themselves on a stage, not moving about too much, and talking, and talking, and talking, and talking. Druid brought a quality of spectacle and physicality to their productions, and The Walworth Farce is very much that. The play is quite knockabout, and let me describe it a bit to give you a sense of what I'm talking about.

The Farce tells of an Irish family of three living in a tatty flat in London. The father, Dinny, is an angry man in a bad suit and flashy shirt, and, often, a rather horrible wig. Dinny has two sons, Sean and Blake, the former with his head partially shaved like someone preparing for brain surgery, the latter frequently done up in ratty dresses. Two of these three never leave the apartment, while the third, Sean, goes out once per day to purchase groceries. He buys the same groceries every day, which serve as props. And today, at the start of this tale, he has accidentally grabbed the wrong grocery bag, and this will be a problem.

You see, the three act out a play every night, devised and modified on the fly by Dinny, who also interrupts the action to act as its director, most frequently when a line is read wrong or a cue is missed, which causes him to fly into tantrums. The three are performing a farce about the reason they left Ireland, and it's a play that requires at least eight actors. Worse still, Dinny never plays anybody but Dinny, and so the others must constantly switch costumes and run about, swapping roles whenever required, and sometimes acting out several parts simply by holding several wigs in the air and changing their voice when the dialogue demands it. Worse stiil, none of them are really actors, and their performances are mannered and occassionally baffling.

The farce is quite funny -- it opens with two funerals, one of Dinny's mother, who was killed when a dead horse came flying over a hedgerow and crushed her, and one of Dinny's neighbor's father, who dies when his speedboat hit a horse, killing it and throwing it over a hedgerow, if I understood the details correctly.

This dind't actually happen, of course. Dinny's tale isn't meant to reveal the truth of his past, but to hide it, and it's just one of the ways he does so, all borrowing from theatrical traditions. He has, as an example, a breathless monologue about coming to London and looking for work as a builder, but the work drying up, and that's a narrative that seems lifted in whole from other plays. Dinny isn't telling the truth here either: There's no evidence he has ever left the London apartment, much less worked in construction, and he has a biscuit tin full of money that he sometimes surreptitiously counts.

This is not a play about how important the truth is, but, instead, how interesting it is when people lie, and how dangerous it becomes when that lie starts to crumble. The farce is hilarious, but Walsh makes it terrifically difficult to enjoy, because he introduces an interloper, a beaming grocery store employee named Hayley, who talks too much and has a bit of a crush on Sean. Hayley finds herself absorbed into the farce, against her will and at great threat of violence, and she responds to it by weeping in terror. It's one of the most deliberately alienating choices I have ever seen a playwright write into a script, because the farce continues, and continues to be funny, but the weeping Hayley has made it impossible for the audience to enjoy it. It's an astonishing demand to make of an audience, to create an entire act in which they don't know precisely how they are supposed to be feeling about what they are watching. If you try to enjoy the farce, there is Hayley's tears to chastise you for it; but you can't really invest yourself in Hayley, because she's not doing enough to be the dramatic focus of the second act, and so you find yourself returning to the farce, which has grown increasing ridiculous, as if to force you to find it funny again, which you do, and then there are Hayley's tears again.

The Walker brought Enda Walsh to speak in their cinema space on Sunday, and had Guthrie Artistic Director Joe Dowling on hand to interview him, as the Guthrie cosponsored this production. Additionally, as it happens, Dublin theater critic Fintan O'Toole is in town to speak about Brian Friel's The Faith Healer, which is at The Guthrie just now, and stars Dowling, so O'Toole was invited to participate in the discussion. Again, I am going to assume this is specifically intended to put me out, as I have been a theater critic for a very long time, and nobody ever invites me to Ireland to speak about Minnesota theater.

Walsh is young, or, at least, youngish -- he's about 42, and looks much younger, with boyish features and a near constant smile. He also produced as close to a genuine spit take as I have ever seen in real life when Fintan O'Toole declared that he had once written a truly brilliant essay on Irish theater. Walsh was so surprised by this bit of comic immodesty that he exhaled sharply, but he happened to be drinking water at the time, and he slapped his hand over his mouth to keep the water from spraying out toward the audience.

He talked about the process of writing the play -- that he had written it in four weeks, but, in truth, it had taken him more than a decade to write, ever since he was younger and would walk around London and see the same Irish family every day, and wonder about them. He does not plan what he is going to write when he starts writing, and so he didn't this play going to be a farce, but was surprised by it. There isn't really an Irish tradition of farce, but Enda felt that it was so indigenous to London theater that it was as though it had burrowed like a weed into the home of his Irish expatriates; Walsh lives in London, so perhaps farce also burrowed into his home and sprouted in his play. He apologetically admitted that he knew the first act might be a bit bewildering: "If I saw it, I might leave at intermission," he said. "I'm glad I wasn't in your head when you saw it."

It's interesting to watch three Irishmen talking about Irish theater -- when Americans talk about theater in America, they tend to define it based on themes, or subcultures represented in the plays -- a play will be a product of gay/lesbian theater, or Yiddish theater, or African-American theater. There's rarely talk about American theater, and American writers rarely try to write in a way that says something about Americanness; not any more, at least, although I recall reading early New Yorker pieces about their disappointment with some of Eugene O'Neill's less successful plays, in that they felt America really needed a great playwright, and he might be it, but he hadn't yet written the great American play. That doesn't seem to be the case anymore, and, were I to actually be invited to Ireland to talk about American theater, I don't know just what I would say -- I can't recall the last time I saw or read an American play that was about Americanness. Maybe 1776, which the Guthrie remounted last year, but debuted in 1969. I'm sure there is still somebody out there trying to write plays about what it means to be American, but, for the most part, American plays, if they are about identity, are about what it means to be part of an American subculture or ethnic or racial minority.

The Irish, at least at the Walker on Sunday, still seemed very interested in what it meant to be Irish, and described their theater in those terms. And it's a theme of The Walworth Farce, although it's often addressed satirically -- Dinny, for instance, often plays saccharine old Irish songs, especially Bing Crosby's "Irish Lullaby." But that's not a song about Ireland, but instead a song about longing for Ireland, and the Ireland in it is romantic and mythic, very different from Dinny's native Cork. Listening to the song at one point in the play, Hayley describes what it brings to mind for her: A red-headed girl surrounded by emerald green flora. She asks Sean if this was the Ireland of his childhood. "No," Sean answers.

Of course, you put three natives of Ireland up on a stage to talk about Irish theater, they're going to talk about theater as it relates to Irish identity, but the subject does still seem to be a matter of national obsession. Walsh describes sitting in a bar in Ireland and being confronted by a fellow drinker, who recognized the London accent that has crept into Walsh's native Irish brogue, and demanded to know how he can be an Irish playwright if he lives in the Great Wen. Walsh doesn't answer the question -- he doesn't really need to, as a significant portion of Irish theater was written in London, including the works of Wilde and Shaw. "If they're successful, they're Irish," Dowling deadpanned. "If not?" Dowling then waved his hand dismissively.

When the discussion was opened to the audience for questions, I had one. I had seen the Guthrie production of The Faith Healer the previous night, and was struck by some similarities -- chiefly that storytelling is used in both plays as a mechanism for masking the truth, rather than revealing it. Walsh and Dowling turned the question over to Fintan O'Toole, and he complimented me on how perceptive my question was; we theater critics stick together like that.

O'Toole talked about how language is often used as a mechanism of distraction in Ireland, rather than a tool of communication, and that Irish theater has a history of writing plays that are very talky, but in which the talk is designed to mask the truth, which is shameful and can't be spoken of.

The truth is never spoken in The Walworth Farce -- not completely, although, in one of the play's rare moment of forthrightness, Sean does offer up a detailed memory of part of what drove his father out of Ireland. I won't get a chance to see the play again -- at least, not any time soon -- so I picked up a copy of the script. Dinny's little farce should be quite interesting to read, and I think the key to it is to look at the details that Dinny includes, even if they are distorted, such as a murder plot and an internecine battle over money. If O'Toole is right -- and he is a very highly regarded critic, so I suspect he is -- one of the keys to reading Irish theater is to ask yourself what is not being talked about, rather than what is, and Walsh's script for The Walworth Farce should be a good starting place for that.

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