Playwright: Sean O'Casey
At: Seanachaí Theatre Company at the Irish-American Heritage Center, 4626 N. Knox Ave. Phone: 866-811-4111;$24-$28. Runs through: Oct. 23
There is a type of civilian male who yearns for the adulation accorded heroes while keeping wide of the actual experience garnering such rewards. Unsurprisingly, many of these Walter Mittys wind up as writers. Donal Davoren, the Yeats wannabe sharing a squalid room with street-peddler Seumas Shields, isn't one of these—not in 1920, with Dublin under English occupation following the 1916 Uprising, its streets patrolled by mercenary agents ( called the Black and Tans, after their improvised uniforms ) exercising all the lawlessness of vigilantes. How Donal's neighbors, flushed with patriotic rhetoric, come to cast him as an undercover rebel assassin remains a mystery, but when the rumors attract the admiration of the pretty girl down the hall, the meek versifier finds it to his advantage to play along.
The nobody mistaken for somebody is a staple of comedy dating to antiquity, and Sean O'Casey prepares us for a cheerful romantic romp featuring reliable stereotypes ( fussy landlords, henpecked husbands, bragging cowards ) representing the meddlesome fellow tenants who invade our bachelors' quarters to editorialize and emote. Right in mid-yarn, however, the dramatic tone does an abrupt turn, giving way to terror after darkness falls and, with it, the martial-law curfew threatening the citizens with random search-and-seizure operations. When Donal and Seumas discover themselves in accidental possession of dangerous contraband, the solution proves to be fatal to the sole member of Donal's fan club willing to walk as bravely as she talks.
Unlike Irish playwright-successor Martin McDonagh, who juxtaposes humor and horror from the very outset, O'Casey gives us no overt warning of the whiplash awaiting us. Alert playgoers may detect hints in the accounts of events familiar to audiences at its premiere in 1923, but lost on nostalgic yankees in 2011—the latter all too ready to embrace cuddly slum-dwelling eccentrics who just happen to suffer domestic abuse, brutal harassment and untimely deaths.
Director John Mossman refuses to abet such illusion. Oh, his first act is replete with the slamming doors and offstage uproar associated with broadly drawn personalities, but each actor in this Seanachaí production has scrutinized O'Casey's text in surgical detail to convey the often-unpleasant complexities behind the initial jollity. Nor do they gloss over the injustice of foreign troops bullying innocents forced to become martyrs. The results leave us shaken and outraged, contemplating the contradictions of civil disorder in a fickle universe.
