How it’s New York: A New York visit appears in the play. Lady Gregory is featured in an
exhibit at the New York Public Library, running through Aug. 1.
How it’s Irish: Lady Augusta Gregory was one of the founders of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, during the Irish Literary Revival.
You may know Ciarán O’Reilly as artistic director of Irish Repertory Theatre. With “Lady G,” which has just had a well-deserved extension to March 29, he dons the mantle of playwright. This piece, with its subtitle “Plays and Whisperings of Lady Gregory,” suggests that we’ll hear some letters, some diary entries, and a play or two. O’Reilly states in the program that in addition to Lady Gregory’s plays, he also used her words from other publications, including her autobiography, and was inspired by the work of several professors.
Well we do get excerpts from letters, narrations of her life. But we also get a smart, funny, touching biographical drama. O’Reilly conceived of the play as Lady G. as a self-aware shade, an actress saying “I’ll be playing this role.” O’Reilly also directs, and as always, his direction crackles with timing and electricity.
The company of four play many roles, except for Úna Clancy, who plays Lady Augusta Gregory herself, the powerhouse who helped found the Abbey Theatre, and without whom we might never have had the theatrical careers of William Butler Yeats, John Millington Synge, Sean O’Casey and many others. Clancy embodies a fascinating force, with her husky voice, smiling face that seems to be about to joke, and elegant, delicate expressions of hurt, pain or anger. She carries the play perfectly.
Why, why, why isn’t Lady Gregory, this amazing creature, a playwright herself, better known? You may well have heard of her. But odds are you had not seen her work (we see two one-acts over the course of the evening; she wrote more than 40!), nor really understand just how instrumental she was.
Lady Gregory died in 1932. it’s 2020, and America still has not had a woman president. (Please, don’t flame me.) That is one quick answer. When people resurrect forgotten writers and artists, an awful lot of times they are women.
The play, which takes place from 1852 to 1932, in locations that include Ireland, Egypt, New York and Boston, performs in the W. Scott McLucas Studio Theatre, but I would love to see it move upstairs. Honestly, I’d love to see it on Broadway. It’s enlightening, entertaining, touching, heartbreaking, inspiring.
Many of us, if we thought of Lady Gregory at all, thought of her as a collector of folklore, not unlike Oscar Wilde’s mother; a funder of serious artists, and a dabbler in theatre. After seeing O’Reilly’s play, you’ll see her differently: the producing that she did was an art itself, something that had never really been done. And her work — we get to see “Workhouse Ward” and “McDonough’s Wife” in their entirety — holds up against Synge. And that’s saying a lot.
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READ: Tortured love for Ireland in ‘The Shadow of a Gunman’
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Lady G. narrates the play, from a 2020 perspective, as if she’s her own ghost. Not that she even really approves of ghosts. We meet her in her house, a room with a fireplace, with a grand old tree downstage right, on which every visitor carved initials (set design by Charlie Corcoran). After she introduces herself, she decides to summon Yeats:
“He was often fond of rousing spirits from
their final resting place and bringing them back. I spent one perfectly dreadful evening with him around Ouija board. I don’t think he would object now if we brought him back for a brief visit.”
Yeats is played with perfect intellectual diffidence by lanky James Russell, who also plays Sir William Gregory, and several other roles in the play.
Lady G. tells us her life, from being one of 16 children on an enormous estate, learning Irish at the knees of her nanny (Played by Terry Donnelly, who brings out the comedy in all the female roles she plays); to marrying a much older neighbor, Sir William Gregory for love — and for his library; to becoming a young widow, and then, to joining forces with Yeats to found the Abbey.
The fourth actor is Irish Rep favorite John Keating, who plays an adulterous love interest and several smaller roles, but later takes your breath away as the grieving, drunk, passionate and ultimately magical McDonough in Gregory’s angry and beautiful “McDonough’s Wife.”
Sound design by M. Florian Staab underscores the emotions as much as the moody lights by Michael O’Connor. Costumes by David Toser are elegant and fluid; the change of a shawl can change a whole character.
The show is long, but generous: at the end of Act One, after the first of Lady Gregory’s one-acts, we even get a slice of her barmbrack (like a fruitcake; the cast sing a slightly rewritten “Mrs. Fogarty’s Christmas cake.”) Hilariously, Lady G gives us a little history of gluten allergy, which, she says, was unknown in 1904. Here again is more of O’Reilly’s wit, as Lady Gregory reads off the ingredients. “Eat at your own peril!” she says.
The play centers primarily on Lady G’s interaction with the Irish Literary Revival.
A widow at the young age of 40, Lady Gregory tells us, “The Irish Literary Movement began when Parnell died.” When Ireland had been facing starvation and survival, its artistic sensibilities had been blunted.
“But with the death of Parnell came an end to the absorbing topic that had occupied all Ireland’s energies for so many years. The literary instinct, necessarily dormant because its expression would have found no audience, awoke, and turned itself toward Drama as a mode of expression. And now a new Ireland began—the Ireland that thinks replaces the Ireland that merely fights,” she explains.
Her home at Coole Park became a gathering place for burgeoning talent; her beech tree a Visitor’s Book. And O’Reilly shows us the scene in her home, with the rain lashing outside, when Lady G. encourages Yeats and Edward Martyn (Keating) to found the Abbey Theatre, as a home for new Irish writing.
The play perfectly balances these bits of narration with enacted drama. Later, when Lady Gregroy tells us of “The Playboy of the Western World,” O’Reilly stages the scandalous scene where the character Christy Mahon says the word “shifts” about Irish women (the offending line is “It’s Pegeen I’m seeking only, and what’d I care if you brought me a drift of chosen females, standing in their shifts itself?”) and the audience explodes with rage. And the excerpt is gorgeous. Few directors and fewer casts would take this brief except, there really just to show the audience what happened, and make you hunger to see the whole play. Russell embodies Christy’s innocence and bravado and pain.
We follow Lady G as she travels with the show to New York City, meets Theodore Roosevelt, walks by the newly-constructed library, and falls in love — a love that is never fulfilled — with John Quinn (Keating). Biographical plays are hard; it’s so easy to fall into a pattern of “and then this happened.” Usually, without a clear point of attack, and a story centering on one particular episode, the show feels long and loses steam. This one never does, and dramaturgs and playwrights should study it to figure out just how that happens.
Perhaps it has something to do with the interruption by the two one-acts. In “Workhouse Ward,” two bed-ridden arguing old men discover that their arguments keep them alive — when one has the chance to leave. It’s funny, but one can understand that with lesser actors than Russell, Keating and Donnelly, it could wear long.
But “McDonough’s Wife” is something else again. A piper whose pipes have an almost magical power returns home from playing at a fair to find his wife has died from a miscarriage— and nobody would help bury her because she was an outsider. Lady Gregory tells us it was inspired by her memory of a real McDonough, “the best of all the wandering pipers. He played at my wedding celebration. So great a piper was he that it has been said the Tuatha de Danaan, the ancient invisible race, had bewitched his pipes.” She wrote the play on her voyage to America, on the back of a ship’s menu.
McDonough’s grief breaks your heart:
“I to bring you traveling, you were the best traveler, and the best stepper, and the best that ever faced the western blast, and the waves of it blowing from you the shawl! I to be sore in the heart with walking you would make a smile of a laugh. I would not feel the road having your company; I would walk every whole step of Ireland. What way did it fail me to see the withering of the branches on every bush, as it is certain they withered the time laughter died with your laugh? The cold of winter has settled on the hearth. My heart is closed up with trouble!”
His curses are terrifying. His realization that he can and will summon them with his pipes — “But I am of the generations of Orpheus, and have in me the breed of his master!”— is thrilling. Keating always amuses and charms at Irish Rep, but this is his best work: powerful, heart-stopping.
And it leads seamlessly into Lady G declaring, “I saw my play as “a hymn of praise to the pride of the artist”. I think we will end on that note. Let us praise the power of words,” she says.
Indeed, and let us praise the power of words and scenes strung together.
