Playwright: John Patrick Shanley. At: Northlight Theatre at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, 9501 N. Skokie Rd. In Skokie. Tickets: 847-673-6300. www.northlight.org; $25-$78. Runs through: April 19
Some stories have been retold so many times that they should come with assembly instructions, like IKEA furniture. Before his venture into issue-driven dramas, John Patrick Shanley's reputation rested on romantic comedies recycling the classic dynamic of discordant lovers—usually from urban blue-collar conclaves—bickering until love goes and fuckin' conquers all. Charged with writing a play about his auld-sod kin, what could be more natural for this Bronx-born-and-raised playwright than to revert to formula?
Our setting is a pair of farms in rural Ireland, owned for centuries by two clans, the Reillys and the Muldoons. Anthony Reilly toils with dogged resignation under the supervision of his irascible Da, only to hear himself belittled for his want of gumption. Next-door neighbor Rosemary Muldoon's ownership of the land representing the boundary between the properties has been a point of contention between their fathers for decades. A marriage would solve this dispute ( Hint! Hint! ), if Rosemary can bring herself to forgive Anthony for an insult inflicted during their infancy.
The playbill designates our time frame as 2008-2013, but you'll find no laptops or satellite phones in evidence. Televised Olympics and advanced medical technology are offstage conveniences, discussed but never seen. Anthony and Rosemary never avail themselves of a day off to visit nearby Dublin for a latté and movie, possibly because neither appears to employ hired personnel to assist with their labors. The overall impression is that of tillers tied to the land as inexorably as their ancestors, making us aware from the start that their mutual encouragement toward seeking wider horizons is futile, that inertia plays a greater part than hormones in forging an amicable merger, and that their protests are merely a pretext for postponing economic imperative. Once the elders are dispatched after supplying necessary exposition, the lovers circle each other for two-thirds of the 90-minute playing time while the stakes, volume and verbal velocity escalate until the inevitable lip lock.
Director BJ Jones has assembled a quartet of North Shore favorites—Kate Fry, Mark Montgomery, Annabel Armour and William J. Norris—to play ethnic archetypes modeled on Brian Friel and Sean O'Casey, surrounded by Kevin Depinet's rustic scenery. Audiences asking nothing more of an evening than it not task them with stressful controversy or jarring revelations ( and who don't listen too closely to the lyrics in Andrew Hansen's likewise nostalgia-infused incidental score ) will leave satisfied. Why else do you think old tales continue to be resurrected?
