How it’s New York & Irish: Origin’s First Irish theater festival continued this year, and for the first time since the pandemic, I got to see Dublin theater group, Fishamble’s, contribution at 59E59 Theater.
The last show I saw from this company, “Maz and Bricks” (see link to our review here) shared producer, Eva Scanlon, and director, Jim Culleton (Irish Times Best Director Award winner 2019) with the recent production, “Heaven”, which was written by Eugene O’Brien (winner of the Rooney Prize for Literature for EDEN).
“Heaven” centers on the relationship of a long married couple Mairead (Janet Moran) and Mal (Andrew Bennett) while they attend a wedding in Mairead’s hometown of Offaly. As with “Maz and Bricks” the story unfolds through monologues by the two characters. Themes of sexuality, relationship and parental dysfunction, with a dash of drug use, and the inevitable ties of familial love are dissected in this hour and a half of engaging theater.
Repressed desires sacrificed for a safe or mainstream life come out in the course of the two day wedding, she in the form of a reunification with an old love and he in the form of desires purposefully repressed. O’Neill’s words for the conflict with Mal’s sexuality are, as with everything Irish, inextricably intertwined with the Catholic Church, its power as always playing a role in the inner lives of the Irish character. He references the Irish as “obedient children” to parental Rome. Mal’s name for his imaginary paramours is always ‘Jesus’, and the thoughts he has been repressing for years, as thoughts coming from the “lower dimensions” (catholic hell). During the weekend with the help of cocaine and a beautiful young man with a beard who actually looks like Jesus, Mal finally comes to terms with his sexuality.
Bennett’s portrayal of a man having taken cocaine for the first time is hilarious and gives incisive insight into the mindset of what the experience is like.
“Everything is all above me – the only reason everyone is here today is for me – it is all about Mal!”.
Incidentally Bennett has a leading role in the first Irish language film to ever receive an Oscar nomination in March this year – “An Cailín Cuain” (as béarla, “The Quiet Girl”).
Mairéad too has her own sexual reawakening on this two day escape in Offaly. Wonderfully acted by Moran, she returns to the hangouts and people from her youth, and puts distance between the woman she has become and connects with the girl she once was, but her demons remain – a father whose ‘cuntishness’ she luckily did not inherit, but had to grow up around, and now a tenuous relationship with her own daughter.
Similar to “Maz and Bricks”, this production uses monologues from the characters to tell its narrative. However in this production the silent character often stays on the stage just moving down stage, often with their back turned to the audience, hinting at what was going on unknown ‘behind their back’.
The use of shadows by Lighting Director Sinead McKenna perfectly encapsulates the issue with all the shadows in the room, (not least of which are the character’s shadow selves) literally. The set designed by Zia Bergin-Holly, to look like an Irish pub and hotel bar of an Irish wedding took me right there with heavy mahogany, brown leather seating, and faux stained glass windows.
This is a universal story of a rocky marriage after years of years of suppression that leads to a surprising yet inconclusive third act resolution.
