How it’s New York: Boys and Girls is playing here as part of 1st Irish theater festival.
How it’s Irish: It is an Irish production, which originally aired at Dublin’s Fringe 2013.
Boys and Girls at E59E59 by Murmur Productions is not for prudes. Lace curtain Irish and even shanty town Irish might want to give this a miss. It is part of the 1st Irish Festival, which closes on Sunday, Sept. 28.
Set in modern Ireland, four young actors who are performers in the spoken word scene in Dublin perform writer and director, Dylan Coburn Gray’s razor sharp, rapid speed, crude take on one night out in Dublin.
The actors seated on the stage when the audience arrives into the theater, a technique that is also used by a very different Dublin set production, Once.
Sitting there chatting among themselves setting the scene for what any group of friends about to hang out for an evening might look like. The short production – approximately one hour – is spent with each character giving a soliloquy-like account of their hopes and plans – almost all of which comprise of predator-like prowl resulting in a sexual conquest – on a boozy Dublin night out.
The writing is extremely sharp and very funny. It is very fast and is hard to capture everything that Coburn Gray is trying to express, and it would be worthy of a couple of visits to E59E to catch it all.
The monologues are shakespearean-like – wordplay is rife as is language such as ‘nary’ and it’s ilk.
Ronan Carey, Maeve O’Mahony, Sean Doyle and Claire O’Reilly are all a joy to watch and clearly adept aficionados of the spoken word genre. Although, they are young, they are seasoned performers in the Dublin theater, TV and film scenes and all but Doyle are either current students or recent graduates of Trinity College. O’Mahony was the standout performance of the evening, portraying an assertive sexual player, to the point of being a predator, managing to encompass the boldness and overconfidence needed for the role with smoothness.
Carey’s character opens the show espousing his love of Google Chrome Incognito, which
allows him to watch endless porn without his family’s knowledge. Three out of the four characters are written as pretty unlikeable and amoral and though there is some character growth in the hour we spend with these characters, it is limited.
The one character who has a steady moral compass seems almost embarrassed by it, and it seems to have socially hindered him.
Coburn Gray is clearly concerned about the current morass Irish youth find themselves in.
Check it out before it closes here – your eyes and ears will be opened!
