How it’s New York: Poet Paul Muldoon lives in New York.
How it’s Irish: The show is a Galway International Arts Festival and Jen Coppinger Production, staged at Irish Repertory Theatre. It was recently staged at the Gate Theatre.
When you come into the house for “Incantata,” Man (Stanley Townsend) is already on stage. He wears a jumpsuit and a backwards baseball cap. A pile of potatoes fills a corner of what seems to be an artist’s studio. Video of the man making prints from the potatoes plays (video design by Jack Phelan). The Talking Heads play from a tapedeck.
What’s going on? Well… it’s a man. Making art. Grieving. Director Sam Yates has taken Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon’s elegy for his artist wife, Mary Farl, who died of cancer at age 43, and turned it into a multimedia one-man lament, by turns mystifying, funny and heartbreaking. Think of it more as an installation or a dance with words, and you’ll enjoy it more. But don’t bring someone who’s just suffered a loss, or who has a sick relative. Muldoon’s words sear the soul. Townsend, with his plummy voice, and a rising desperation and anger, radiates pain — even when Man cracks jokes.
Muldoon wrote “Incantata” in three days, he states in the program. Muldoon also describes the stanza forms he used — but you probably won’t notice stanza forms. What you see is a man who refers often to Beckett characters, in particular Vladimir and Estragon. He sometimes turns the camera into a wraithlike figure and addresses it directly. At times, Man seems to be talking to his wife, a woman who believed that everything was fated, and thus refused surgeries. He’s angry. He’s sad.
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Rosanna Vize designed the strange shed of a set, and costumes; Paul Keogan created the moody lights, and Sinéad Diskin the sound design, which included “Silhouettes on the Shade” and a song by Blondie. Teho Teardo created compositions.
Not everything works. Sometimes, Yates and Townsend work too hard to make all Muldoon’s nouns present, and the piece feels too “acted,” too much like a poem working hard to be dramatic. Ultimately “Incantata” works best when it relaxes. Man recalling “those Sunday mornings picking at sesame noodles and all sorts of dim sum” hurts. This moment sums up, with both poetry and drama, those mundane moments of intimacy, that sucker punch you when gone. The bells and whistles of art, of video, of music, cannot stave off grief. And Yates shows that he knows this. Near the end of the play, a startling crash and Man’s monotone, recitative (rather than acted) repetition of a section of lines suggest that what we have seen for an hour may have been all along only inside his grieving state of mind.
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“Incantata” continues at Irish Rep through March 15. Tickets are available at 212-727-2737 or online at irishrep.org.
