'Waiting For Godot' (Druid Theatre Company)

As frequent ROTters will know, I consider Waiting for Godot one of the most important plays of the 20th century—perhaps the single most important work of Western theater.  It confused many viewers, both theater pros and general audiences, when it first hit the stages of Europe and the United States in the early 1950s, and many dismissed it.  But it changed everything that came after.  Western theater has never been the same.  Just the week after I saw a new staging of Godot, I saw the revival of a 2004 play, Thom Pain (based on nothing) by Will Eno, who was described at its U.S première in the New York Times as “a Samuel Beckett for the Jon Stewart generation.”

I don’t get to see all the new productions of Samuel Beckett’s masterpiece, but I go to as many as I can manage, so when my friend Diana called over the summer to tell me that coming to the 2018 Lincoln Center White Light Festival was a production of the Druid Theatre Company of Galway, Ireland, one of whose previous productions I’d seen six years ago (Famine by Tom Murphy, part of the three-play series DruidMurphy presented at the Lincoln Center Festival that summer; see my post on 24 July 2012), I jumped at the chance.  We booked seats at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College of Criminal Justice on West 59th Street for the 7:30 performance on Friday evening, 9 November.

The Druid’s presentation of Waiting for Godot ran from 2 to 13 November 2018.  Previously, the production ran at the company’s home theater in Galway from 22 February to 3 March 2018 and then toured Ireland, playing Limerick, Letterkenny, Dublin, Cork, Longford, Wexford, Dún Laoghaire, and Sligo.  Before coming the New York’s White Light Festival, the Druid’s Godot appeared at Washington, D.C.’s Shakespeare Theatre Company (17 April–20 May), the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre (23 May-3 June), and the Edinburgh International Festival (3-12 August); the production also made a return trip to Druid’s hometown for the Galway International Arts Festival (7–23 July).  (The explanation for the very short run at the home theater, a scant 10 days, is director Garry Hynes’s “very low expectations,” according to actor and former columnist for Back Stage Michael Kostroff.  “We very deliberately scheduled it for a very short run in our own 100-seat theater,” said the director, “so that if we fell on our ass with it there weren’t going to be too many people around to watch the damage.”  The evidence is that they didn’t stumble—not by a longshot.)

The White Light Festival, now in its ninth year, is Lincoln Center’s annual exploration of music and art’s power to reveal the many dimensions of our interior lives.  International in scope, the multidisciplinary festival offers a broad spectrum of the world’s leading instrumentalists, vocalists, ensembles, choreographers, dance companies, and directors complemented by conversations with artists and scholars and post-performance White Light Lounges. The festival will occupy six venues in the Lincoln Center area to present more than a dozen events.  “This year,” says Jane Moss, festival director, “we focus on what it means to be human in an increasingly fractious world—a world where communication, compassion, and creative expression remain vital to our survival as a global community.”  The festival takes its name from a quotation by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt (b. 1935): “I could compare my music to white light, which contains all colors.  Only a prism can divide the colors and make them appear; this prism could be the spirit of the listener.”  

(For background on the Druid Theatre Company, see my report on Famine, referenced above; for a short bio of Samuel Beckett, see the report on the last production of Godot I saw, performed at New York University’s Jack H. Skirball Center for the Performing Arts three years ago by Gare St Lazare Ireland, posted on 31 October 2015 [https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2015/10/waiting-for-godot.html].  See my report on While I Was Waiting, posted on Rick On Theater on 1 August 2017, for a brief profile of the Gerald W. Lynch Theater.  There is more detailed information on the playwright and his absurdist tragi-comedy in “Thoughts on Waiting For Godot” and “More Thoughts on Waiting For Godot,” 1 and 3 April 2009.)

There’s really no plot in Godot, of which Irish Times reviewer Vivian Mercier said in 1956, it’s “a play in which nothing happens, twice.”  (That wasn’t a put down.  Mercier went on to exclaim that it nevertheless “keeps audiences glued to their seats.”)  Of course, Beckett says so himself: One of his characters declares, “Nothing happens.  Nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful.”  I describe the events of the play in my report on the 2015 Godot).  In brief, act one presents Estragon (Aaron Monaghan, short and stocky), called Gogo (already on stage before the lights come up), and Vladimir (tall, thin, and rangy Marty Rea), known as Didi, as they wait for a man called Godot—who famously never comes.  A study in absurdist co-dependency.  The two wayfarers, obviously once refined men now down on their luck, occupy themselves with various time-passing activities—the French title of the play, the version Beckett wrote first, is En attendant Godot, which translates as “While waiting for Godot”—until they meet Pozzo (Rory Nolan) and Lucky (Garrett Lombard, looking like a Noh white lion character in hobo drag) passing through the barren landscape with one, lone, leafless tree.  Pozzo is the master, the slave-holder, the man of importance; Lucky is his mostly mute, cowed menial whom Pozzo leads by a long rope around his neck.  After Pozzo and Lucky depart, a boy (Jaden Pace at the performance I saw; he alternates with Nathan Reid) arrives to tell Gogo and Didi that Godot will not come today, but surely tomorrow. 

In act two, the same events occur, though Pozzo and Lucky are traveling in the opposite direction and Pozzo has had a change of fortune: he’s now blind.  After the travelers leave, the boy comes again with the same message.  Indeed, a play of little action, in the strictest sense as Aristotle or Stanislavsky would define it—but riveting and eternally revealing.  At two hours and 30 minutes in length, the performance seems to zoom by and I sat, as I have at other performances of Waiting for Godot since I first saw it as a college freshman in 1965, engrossed and mesmerized, listening afresh to Beckett’s words, hearing them again for the first time. 

It doesn’t make much sense for me to review Beckett’s play again (see what I said in the Gare St Lazare report); I haven’t changed my mind about it.  Each time I see Waiting for Godot, I become more certain that my first impression was absolutely correct and really great productions confirm that opinion in spades.  The Druid staging qualifies as great; even Diana extolled it enthusiastically, including a week later when she and I met to see the Thom Pain revival at the Signature Theatre Company (report forthcoming).  It was magnificent!  Possibly the best Godot I’ve seen so far.  (I’m leaving room for future productions, but I’d be surprised that any surpass the Druid’s.)  I also repeat what I said in 2015 about providing an interpretation of the play: There are so many, and they get so complex that it would be bootless to attempt one here—so I won’t.  (Interested readers can find some discussion of the play’s meaning(s) in the two 2009 articles I mentioned above.)

None of the cast are stars over here (though they all appeared in 2012’s Famine, which was also helmed by Hynes), so this wasn’t a bravura performance, but an excellent ensemble that revealed some things in the play I’d never noticed before (or maybe forgotten).  At 2½ hours (including intermission), it just zipped by without lags or slow-downs.  Oh, and it’s funny, too—often hilarious, with music hall gags and classic comic turns, all executed with alacrity by the Mutt and Jeff of Beckettworld, pratfalls from the portly Pozzo, and Lucky’s insane “thinking” on command (which received enthusiastic applause from the audience) that comes off like Professor Irwin Corey on acid (assuming, of course, that Corey wasn’t already on acid).  The White Light audience was especially receptive to the humor, both low and highbrow.

In that other Irish production of Godot in 2015, I don’t recall the Irish dialect featuring so prominently in the performance.  (I checked my report and I never mentioned an accent.)  Here, Rea’s Didi and Monaghan’s Gogo both use it, which makes Beckett’s lines absolutely musical.  (That alone made me notice some lines on which I haven’t focused before.  I was particularly struck with Gogo’s realization, “Everything oozes.  It’s never the same pus from one minute to the next” because it’s a grotesque restatement of a key term of Heraclitus of Ephesus, one of Beckett’s principal philosophical sources, who said: “Everything flows.”  One cannot place the same foot in the same stream a second time, the classic Greek philosopher explained, because neither the foot nor the stream is by then the same.)  It was truly beautiful just to listen to!  Interestingly, Nolan’s Pozzo is more English in his speech than Rea/Didi and Monaghan/Gogo, which adds a level of political commentary (which I suspect Beckett didn’t intend, but which isn’t intrusive and is even titillating):  Pozzo, the slave-master, the autocrat, the self-important bully, is English, literally throwing bones to the two Irish wayfarers—who, in this production, are clearly once-prosperous gentlemen who’ve fallen low (rather than just tramps or even tramp-clowns à la Emmett Kelly, as they were in the Gare St Lazare rendering). (For the record, young Pace is an American actor and was not made to affect an accent, either English or Irish.)

Overall, the acting and production were superb.  None of the roles (even the boy) is easy, and I can tell you from my own brief experience as an actor that plays like Beckett’s, Absurdist and anti-realistic scripts, are harder than even Shakespeare or the Greeks.  Maybe the artistic challenge puts everyone on his acting toes, but for whatever reason, the Druid company’s Waiting for Godot was a showcase.  As absurd (lower case) as the stage life is, these actors all made it look perfectly reasonable—within the world of Beckett and Godot.  If you’ll allow me to make a crass analogy, it’s a lot like watching the films of Star Wars or Lord of the Rings: we know those worlds don’t really exist, but for the span of the movie, we believe they do and all the people who live in them behave in accordance with the rules, forces, and environments of those snow globes.  That’s what Monaghan, Rea, Nolan, Lombard, and Pace all have to do—and accomplish seamlessly.  I suspect it’s easier to do in the Star Wars or Ring movies because, first, of all the technical assistance the filmmakers have on call and, second, they don’t have to do it live in front of an audience.  They also don’t have to keep it up for 2½ hours, eight performances a week.  

(I have no evidence for this, but I have a feeling that, while most actors and directors who do Shakespeare or Shaw or Molière or Mamet or Hansberry do it because the think the plays are good or important, they do Waiting for Godot because they love it.  Oh, sure, most directors and actors have favorite Shakespeares or Shaws—I love Much Ado About Nothing and The Man of Destiny, for instance—but an entire cast of Hamlet lovers?  Probably not.  But Godot?  I bet if you polled the casts and directors of every major production of that play, you’ll find that almost everyone involved signed on out of love for the play.  Just a feeling.)

Hynes’s staging is more physical than many I’ve seen—not just in the sight gags, which are generally played for laughs, but in the constant business in which Gogo and Didi engage.  (Remember, the point of the play is what the two men do while they’re waiting for Godot.  It’s not about the waiting; it’s about passing the time during the waiting.)  All four of the main actors, Monaghan, Rea, Nolan, and Lombard, are superb physical performers, especially Monaghan and Rea, and Gogo, Didi, and Pozzo always seem to be in motion in some way or another, even if they’re just vibrating or swaying.  Waiting for Godot isn’t a play about activity or motion, yet Hynes’s version seemed right nonetheless.  The difference is that these wanderers don’t wait inactively or motionlessly; for them, waiting is an action.

Designer Francis O’Connor’s conception of Beckett’s “A country road.  A tree.” is a flat, arid space (no road as such) with a leafless tree shaped like a gigantic divining rod pointing at the ground—as if signaling that whatever the travelers are looking for, this is where to search—and an egg-shaped rock, smooth, white, and oval, where Didi and (especially) Gogo sit when they’re not bouncing around the bleached terrain.  It’s not a claustrophobic or confining place, but there’s nothing here to recommend it as a good place to wait.  It’s still a prison, albeit without walls—after all, Didi and Gogo can’t escape it; they may leave, but they always come back.  The whole set, though, is enclosed by a color-changing lighted frame that sets a mysterious boundary around this little world.  From the way Didi and Gogo look out into the distance in either direction, striking a cartoon sailor’s searching posture—one foot thrust way back, torso leaning as far forward as physically possible, and one hand shading the eyes for better viewing—it’s clear that as bare as the waiting place is, the landscape all around the two is even emptier. 

Lit by James F. Ingalls with shades of white light, bright during the day, dim at night, but with no visible color, the gray cyclorama that stands in for the sky is as characterless as the land.  At night, a balloon-like moon floats in from the stage-left wing (reminding me somewhat of Rover, the menacing balloon guard that prevented prisoners from escaping The Village in the ’60s British TV series The Prisoner).

O’Connor’s dress for Didi and Gogo makes obvious that they aren’t the baggy-pants clowns of the Gare St Lazare production and not quite “gentlemen of the road,” but once-successful men of some affluence who’ve fallen on hard times.  The clothing also seems to enhance the physical contrast of the two wanderers.

Show-Score based its review survey on 21 notices, but the site included 10 reviews of performances in Ireland, Washington, and Chicago.  Based only on the ratings for the 11 New York City reviews, the average score was 85, with a top score of 97 (Show Showdown) followed by a 95 (Exeunt magazine) and a low score of 70 (TheaterScene.net), backed by a 75 (New York Times).  All the published reviews tallied by Show-Score (100%) were positive.  I’ll survey nine reviews for my round-up.

In the New York Times, the only newspaper to cover the White Light’s Godot, Ben Brantley began his review by asking, “Have you ever paused to consider the spiritual and physical affinities between the desolate universe of Samuel Beckett and the wacky world of vintage Warner Brothers cartoons?”  Well, I never have, and Brantley acknowledged that he hadn’t, either.  “Or at least not until I saw the Druid Theatre’s production of Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot.’”  Calling the production “highly stylized and very funny” in his 75-rated notice, the Timesman confessed, “I found myself transported to Saturday mornings with Looney Tunes from my childhood,” adding, “Little did I know then, as I chuckled over the frantic antics of Daffy and Bugs and company, that I was taking an extended course in existential futility.”  Among the parallels with the universe of cartoons, Brantley pointed out “the sense that no matter how hard and cruel the day has been, those who lived through it are ready to begin the same old punishing routine the next morning” and, perhaps most pointedly, “the suspicion, which freezes into certainty, that those who work so ardently to achieve their elusive goals will never, ever be rewarded: not Wile E. Coyote in pursuit of the fleet Road Runner, nor Sylvester the Cat, hungry eyes forever trained on the unreachable Tweety Bird.”  The same, he observed, is true of Vladimir and Estragon. 

In addition to their “vaudevillian and music-hall-clown nature,” Brantley found that “the improbably elastic pair of Aaron Monaghan (Gogo) and Marty Rea (Didi) float them into the stratosphere of the Looney Tunes menagerie.”  The Times reviewer pronounced the production “one of the most accessible, and enjoyable, ‘Godots’ on record.  It’s lively and sensibly silly enough to take a child to, at least for its first act.”  He affirmed, “Every one of the jokes, in all their fugue-like repetition, lands solidly.  And lines to which I’ve never paid much attention before stand out in illuminated relief.” 

“What you may find yourself missing,” Brantley lamented, “is the deeply touching familiarity of Gogo and Didi’s relationship, a portrait of marriage of sorts, in which interdependence is mixed with impatience and irritability.”  (I’m not so sure this co-dependency was lacking.  Another reviewer said of the Edinburgh International Festival that the relationship was like that of a father with a toddler.)  He found the production’s “comic exaggeration can feel a bit distancing.”  “Still,” wrote the reviewer, “I can’t imagine a better introduction than this lucid and entertaining cartoon of a show.”

Emily Nemens declared in the Paris Review, “The Galway-based company knows its Beckett, . . . nailing not only the dialogue but those strange stage directions, bowler hat blowing and all.”  Nemens continued, “By the end of the two acts, I felt like I’d known Gogo and Didi . . . for many more moons than the two that rise onstage—it’s a testament to the pair’s ability to perform the challenging script, which is at once existentially wrought and physically demanding.  Both are taken to their logical extremes with the actors’ emphatic delivery (there are squeaks, whispers, shouts) and physical feats (there’s a good moment of shoe-tugging that looks more like partners’ yoga).”  Sympathizing with Gogo and his sore feet because she’d injured her own, the Paris reviewer asserted that “the strange sense of urgency wrapped in never-ending limbo that compels Beckett’s play is bigger than my busted pinkie toe.  It echoes across the ‘muddy’ scenery and into all of our lives.”

In the review with the highest rating from Show-Score, a 97, Wendy Caster labeled the Druid production of Godot “superb” on Show Showdown and proclaimed it “damn close to perfect.”  Caster felt, “Garry Hynes’s meticulous direction exquisitely balances the pain and humor of Beckett’s heartbreakingly funny play.”  She even found parallels between “the rich bully Pozzo, full of bluster and in desperate need of constant flattery”  and our “45th president,” making the  play hit “particularly hard this time around.”  The Show Showdowner affirmed, “Everyone affiliated with the production provides top-notch work,” adding a “special tip of the hat to movement director Nick Winston, whose work deliciously blends clowning and grace.” 

In her review which scored a 95 on Show-Score, Exeunt magazine’s Ran Xia made a painterly reference to set the tone of her notice and the play: “The color scheme recalls Rembrandt, but the aesthetics are full Magritte: making something tragic-sad into whimsy.”  (I have to quote Xia’s next remark—because it could be me saying this; in fact, I did say it: “Waiting for Godot has always been one of my favorite plays.  It is a pretty much flawless script.  Over the years I’ve seen a fair share of topnotch productions and with each one I see, I hear something new and realize something fresh to unpack.”)  The Exeunt reviewer further declared, “Never have I experienced Waiting for Godot in such a brand new way than I did with director Garry Hynes’ interpretation,” adding that the Druid rendition “is by far the funniest version I’ve seen.”  She affirmed, “The result is deeply satisfying.  It galvanizes an unsettling, surreal, and entertaining version of Godot.” 

Xia, like me, was taken with the language of the Druid staging of Godot.  “The poetry of this production is built in in a macro way.  The rhythm of the language is stylized, but accessible; it treats every word with care, yet doesn’t take itself too seriously.”  I attributed this in large part of the Irish English spoken by actors Monaghan and Rea.  Xia makes a somewhat similar judgment, finding that “the performers’ Irish lilts . . . grounds the language in a kind of naturalism that cannot be achieved with an American or British accent.”  She even draws a  conclusion from the fact that Pozzo, Lucky, and the boy don’t use Irish accents: “this further accentuates the ‘otherness’ of Estragon and Vladimir.”  Xia’s concluding assessment of Druid’s Waiting for Godot is quite personal:

Godot has always made me cry, but Druid’s version made me laugh harder than I ever have before.  It later became the most unsettling too, in a satisfying way.  I’ve heard it said that the purpose of theatre is to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.  I see Waiting for Godot as the epitome of that.

The website New York Stage Review posted two reviews of Godot.  In one, David Finkle asserted that Beckett’s play is “the great play of the 20th century” and affirmed that “nothing done in Garry Hynes’ production . . . makes me think otherwise.  If anything, it substantiates and enhances my opinion.”  Finkle’s colleague Michael Sommers found that the “Druid theater company . . . delivers a very fine staging of Waiting for Godot that lends the play a glowing sense of humanity.”  He reiterated, “The production . . . presents a truly radiant interpretation of Beckett’s challenging work.”  Sommers remarked extensively on “the natural quality of [the] easy rapport” of Monaghan’s Estragon and Rea’s Vladimir, feeling that their “personal warmth and vitality . . . brightens the existential desolation of Beckett’s classic.”  In addition, “Somehow they are able to be as funny as they are poignant, and that’s quite an achievement.”  Sommers also comments on the Irish accents of the performers, which he felt “underscore the musical quality of Beckett’s dialogue and point up its Irish rhythms.”  Overall, the cyber-reviewer concluded, Hynes “successfully infuses Beckett’s bleak study in existence with a warm, wonderful sense of humor and eternal life.”

On Broadway World, Adam Cohen asserted, “The production excels at finding the humor in the mundane; it pierces with a gracious, poignant truth of friendship” and the director “mines the piece for its quiet moments and visceral existential angst and vaudeville farce.  She firmly redefines our notion of tragic daily rituals while finding the necessary, vital humor.”  Cohen added, “There's immense heart to this production” and he found, “Hynes direction is assured, filled with comedic grace and the brittle tension of daily grind.” 

David Barbour of Lighting & Sound America deemed “that Garry Hynes' production has an antic physicality that gives this Godot an artfully cartooned quality all its own.”  He asserted, “Indeed, in this Godot, the news is so awful that there's nothing left to do but laugh.”  Barbour complained, however, “The one weakness of this approach is that—during the first half, especially—the actors seem to leap from one comic conceit to another with such skill that some of the play's darker, deeper notes are obscured.”  But he backed off some, conceding that “in the later passages, a genuine and profound sense of loss emerges.”  The LSA reviewer’s final analysis was: “For all its comic invention, Hynes' approach may not be to all tastes . . . .  But if, like me, you recognize Beckett's essential place in the dramatic canon while quarreling—for reasons of temperament, philosophy, or religious belief—with his vision, this may be the Godot for you.”

Show-Score’s lowest-rated review, with a score of 70, was Darryl Reilly’s notice on TheaterScene.net, in which he explained, “Yoga tree poses, pratfalls, and rapid-fire verbal delivery reminiscent of Abbott and Costello routines are characteristic of how director Garry Hynes answers the question of what to do with Samuel Beckett’s masterpiece, Waiting for Godot.”  Reilly reported, “Ms. Hynes has the cast at full speed emphasizing slapstick and employing stylized poses and gestures.  There’s exaggerated choreography-like movement such as extending legs and dipping down, grabbing at each other and jumping.”  He felt that this tactic was “accomplished if overdone” because the “plethora of gags and set up punchline recitation gets laughs at the expense of emotional resonance.”  The TS reviewer thought, however, “A few bits are quietly played due to the nature of those specific passages and are quite lovely,” but “[o]verall, there is a lack of visceral depth to this arguably superficial treatment.”  His final word was: “This Waiting for Godot is overall pleasing without making much of an impact.”

[I got to the theater for Godot at about 7:15 for the 7:30 curtain. (I had a problem on the subway.)  I arrived to be greeted by a longish line for security checks.  I encountered heavy security for To the End of the Land, the Israeli play I saw at the Lynch at last year’s Lincoln Center Festival (report posted 6 August 2017), but there’d been threats and protests for that.  I don’t know why there’d have to be such security measures for an Irish production of Waiting for Godot. ] 

'Famine' (Lincoln Center Festival 2012)

Among the greatest pleasures of living in New York City are the city’s big, annual international theater festivals like the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave and the Lincoln Center Festival, and the opportunities they provide to see theater work from all over the globe. Anywhere else that I know of—Edinburgh is a notable exception—theatergoers have to trust that some important company from Moscow, Tokyo, or Sydney will make a tour and stop in their city. It’s haphazard and only select troupes make the stop every few years. Here, we get some companies nearly every season and others that come along as a rare treat, but we get a wide selection every year. And we still get the one-off tours as well! (Not to forget the smaller shows, too: with the New York International Fringe Festival that occupies lower Manhattan for several weeks in the summer, we get to see productions of small companies from across the U.S. and around the world and the New York Musical Theatre Festival brings in musical plays from a wide variety of sources, too.)

My frequent theater friend, Diana, and I selected several performances in this year’s Lincoln Center Festival (5 July to 5 August in spaces all over the Lincoln Center neighborhood) but the event’s popularity foiled our complete plans and we could only book one play this season. (Diana and I both had some scheduling conflicts that reduced our choices as well.) So on Thursday evening, 12 July, we met at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College, just south and west of Lincoln Center’s campus, to see one of the three plays in DruidMurphy, a triplet of performances from the Druid Theatre Company of Galway. The three plays, Conversations on a Homecoming (1985), A Whistle in the Dark (1961), and Famine (1968), all by Tom Murphy, weren't written together (director Garry Hynes doesn’t want them to be called a trilogy), but they are linked by the theme of Irish emigration. The company calls DruidMurphy “a story both of those who went and those who were left behind” and the three plays cover a span of years from the 1840s to the 1970s.

The Druid Theatre Company, the first Irish professional theater based outside Dublin, was founded in Galway in 1975 by Garry Hynes, Mick Lally, and Marie Mullen, graduates of the National University of Ireland, Galway. Hynes became the first artistic director, until 1991 and then again from 1995; she’s also the stage director of DruidMurphy. The troupe’s home base is a once-abandoned, derelict part of the city where Druid presents work at its own theatre on Druid Lane as well as touring extensively around Ireland and the globe. (DruidMurphy, which previously appeared in London in June, returns to Ireland for several tour stops until it recrosses the Atlantic for performances at the Kennedy Center in Washington in October.) In 2009, for instance, Druid toured to Australia, Canada, the U.K., and the U.S. Among the playwrights whose works Druid has presented are Enda Walsh (The New Electric Ballroom; Penelope), Martin McDonagh (The Cripple of Inishmaan; The Beauty Queen of Leenane), and Eugene O’Neill (Long Day’s Journey into Night). The theater has a playwriting program intended to promote new plays, but they are also dedicated to “reinvigorating” the classics. DruidSynge, composed of six plays by late-19th- and early-20th-century dramatist John Millington Synge, was presented at Lincoln Center in 2006, for instance, and the company staged Sean O'Casey's The Silver Tassie at Lincoln Center last summer. The concept for DruidMurphy, which has a cast of 16 and runs about 9½ hours if you see it in a one-day marathon, began in 2009 and gestated in the mind of Garry Hynes for three years. It débuted at the Town Hall Theatre in Galway on 23 May 2012 and had its London première at the Hampstead Theatre on 23 June as part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad. The Lincoln Center performances are the collection’s U.S. première.

Thomas Bernard Murphy, the youngest of ten children, was born in 1935 in Tuam, a town of fewer than 3,000 people in County Galway. He wrote for the local amateur drama society while working as an apprentice at the town’s sugar refinery. A Whistle in the Dark, the playwright’s first full-length work, was produced in London in 1961 when the famed Abbey Theatre of Dublin rejected it, declaring, according to the New York Times, that “no characters such as these exist.” Following Whistle, Murphy moved to London and wrote for TV and the movies. After a handful of other plays, including Famine, Murphy returned to Ireland in 1970. His work, which totals more than two dozen plays, was often compared to the Angry Young Men of British theater—John Osborne and Edward Bond—but when John Lahr was at the Village Voice (he’s now at the New Yorker), the reviewer observed the similarities to a different British writer: Harold Pinter. (Current Voice writer Alexis Soloski made this comparison as well in her review of DruidMurphy, while a couple of other reviewers have invoked African-American playwright August Wilson.) But the writer’s style is varied: some of his plays are naturalistic, some surreal, some lyrical, and some combine aspects of several styles. Murphy, however, has the reputation of being, as one Irish novelist phrased it, “the writer whom other Irish writers most admire.” Nonetheless, compared to McDonagh, Conor McPherson, Synge, Samuel Beckett, and Brian Friel, it seems the 77-year-old playwright is seldom produced in the U.S.

Diana and I chose to see Famine, the last (and longest) of the three performances but the one set earliest. First staged at Dublin's Peacock Theatre in 1968, the play is set in western Ireland’s County Mayo in 1846 during the worst period in the history of Ireland. In the village of Glanconnor, the second crop of potatoes has failed and the tenant farmers now face the prospect of starvation. The British government (all of Ireland was part of the United Kingdom then; the Irish Free State wasn’t established in the south until 1922) refuses to aid the farmers, denying even that there is a famine, and the English and Anglo-Irish landowners promise help only to tenants who agree to emigrate to Canada. Family head and village elder John Connor, for whose family the town’s named, is in the midst of widespread starvation and poverty and he must do “what’s right” for his neighbors, his family, God, and, most importantly, himself. In 12 continuously horrendous scenes, Murphy depicts the Irish potato famine as the incident that triggered a massive exodus—encouraged and abetted by the English and Anglo-Irish landholders who wanted to reassert control of their land from the tenant farmers and use it to graze lower-maintenance sheep—that depleted the Irish population by nearly two million people. (The action of Ireland’s overlords also had the benefit of eliminating a large number of troublesome Irish Catholics, an outcome greatly desired by the Protestant English and Anglo-Irish.) Connor must choose, both for himself and his fellow villagers who will follow his lead, whether to stay on their farms, facing almost certain starvation and death, the annihilation of their families and the very traces of their presence on Earth, or to flee in the “coffin ships” to an unknown fate in a strange land thousands of miles away, not even knowing if they’ll be welcome much less provided for. As in all of Murphy’s works, as I understand his thematic focus from other reports, Famine explores the notion of “home”—what it is, what it means, where it takes you. Does it even exist?

While violence is at the core of most of Murphy’s plays, the brutality in Famine is largely of the “spiritual plane,” as a local Tuam writer put it: “it is the violence done to a people, and by extension to a national psyche, by repression, hunger, eviction and starvation.” (There are, nonetheless, several intense instances of the ordinary kind of violence as well, including one that’s as horrendous as any I’ve ever seen on stage.) “While I was researching ‘Famine,’” recalls Murphy, “I asked myself, ‘Am I a student of famine or a victim of famine?’ I finally decided that I was a victim, and it was from that viewpoint that I wrote it.” Our choice turned out to have been the bleakest of the three-play repertory.

DruidMurphy was presented at the Lincoln Center Festival from 5 to 14 July, with each play being offered separately on successive evenings and the then the cycle was repeated. (There were also two dates on which spectators could see all three plays in one marathon viewing, starting at 1 p.m. and ending, after a half-hour intermission and an hour-and-a-half dinner break, at 10:20.) Of the other two plays in the series Hynes assembled for DruidMurphy, Conversations on a Homecoming, set in the mid-1970s, recounts a 10-year reunion of old friends, now all disillusioned and bitter, in a County Galway pub, celebrating the sudden return of a would-be actor from a failed attempt to make it in New York. Set in 1960, A Whistle in the Dark, written when Murphy was only 25, is about an Irish emigrant and his non-Irish wife living in Coventry, England, whose home is invaded by his brutal and sadistic father and brothers. The family draws the young man back into its thuggish ways with violent results. (Murphy’s said he revisited two of the plays, Conversations and Whistle, and made some changes for the Druid presentation. He doesn’t seem to have reworked Famine, though I can’t be certain.)

It looks like Diana and I didn’t choose well. By all accounts, the other two plays are more accessible and because the acting was universally lovely and sensitive, another example might have been a better experience. (Not knowing Murphy’s work or, really, the work of Druid, we didn’t want to commit to three plays.) “Bleak” was the word most reviews and descriptions of Famine used and it’s right on. The other descriptor should have been “unrelentingly” because the grimness never lets up. The first scene is a wake for a daughter of John Connor who'd clearly died from the effects of the famine (a million Irish died from it or from illnesses caused by it), and the play only gets more desolate. Only one scene of the 12 has a different tone—not what you’d call happy, by any means, but at least it attacks the issue from a different angle; the other 11 are of a single oppressive note. Though the plot advances slightly over the two hours and 50 minutes of playing time—the final act toward which the story leads is the lose-lose decision of Connor whether to emigrate or not—every other scene is the same. As this was only Murphy’s second full-length play, I wonder if he was trying to communicate the unrelenting bleakness of the historical event, its devastating effect on the Irish people, and tried to put that directly on stage without seeing that there’s a disconnect between the reality of the history and the demands of theatre. Whatever the reason, Famine wore on me to the extent that I couldn’t get into it for more than a few minutes at a time—I kept dropping out until I forced myself to pay attention again—and I couldn’t get a feeling of empathy or even sympathy for the characters even though it was obvious that they were suffering prodigiously. Some reports, such as the New York Times’s Charles Isherwood’s review, suggested that the remoteness of the time makes the play less accessible than the other two, though we manage to get into many other plays set in distant times and places. I, however, blame my problem entirely on what the New York Post’s Elisabeth Vincentelli described as the play’s “uncompromisingly grim” quality, and it ended up being exceedingly enervating.

Not only were the tone and theme of each scene (except that one at the end of the first act, “The Relief Committee”) the same, but the lighting was a dim, twilight level all the way through the production. As the audience was still taking their seats before the play, two figures came on stage—there was no curtain—at about five minutes before the wake scene started. A very tall man (whom I later decided was Brian Doherty, who portrays Connor and towers over the rest of the cast) turned and left a small, white-haired old woman (probably Marie Mullen, who plays Connor’s mother, Sinéad) to stand silently and motionlessly in the center of the set. This occurred in what I thought was the pre-set, but the lights, as designed by Chris Davey, never got brighter outside “The Relief Committee”: it was always gloomy and shadowy. The sun, it seems, never shone on Glanconnor, Ireland, in 1846.

Francis O’Connor’s setting, a unified concept with elements of suggested Realism (the rows of potato plants growing along the apron of the Lynch’s proscenium stage, a hill of barren dirt rising in the up-stage left corner of the set), was mostly Expressionistic, especially as aided by Davey’s shadowy lighting. A patchwork wall of corrugated metal panels formed the rear of the set, with a rectangular doorway cut into it at stage right. Just below the door in the corrugated wall, a tall piece of grey wall stood, a sort of conventional blind that marked a change of location: when characters exited the downstage area to go someplace more distant but represented on another part of the stage, going around the free-standing panel symbolized that they’d covered some ground. While the acting was all naturalistic, the design was a fusion—except Joan O’Clery’s costumes, which were entirely naturalist, though with what I’d call an edge. The tenant farmers of Glanconnor village were dressed in tatters that barely hung on their bodies, especially the women and children (one reviewer described them as “looking like . . . zombies”) while the Relief Committee—all English or Anglo-Irish: a justice of the peace, a priest, a landowning army captain, a merchant, and a landlord—wore the spiffiest, cleanest, most pristine attire imaginable. While the farmers wore rags not possible outside of a Dickens tale, the toffs who were charged with their rescue had on clothes not only freshly dry-cleaned, but just out of the box! (This was the scene that was also brightly lit and, though the characters are hardly admirable, they were played with high energy and self-confidence.)

The physical production wasn’t the only aspect of Famine that demonstrated this mix of Naturalism and Expressionism. For the most part—all the dialogue scenes—the actors behaved naturalistically, even with Murphy’s frequently lyrical use of Irish-accented lines. (That accent was “thick as Guinness,” wrote Joe Dziemianowicz in the Daily News—on top of the rural colloquialisms. If the company modified the dialect for American ears, I couldn’t tell. The Relief Committee, including the Irish characters, all spoke with upper-class English accents.) Hynes incorporated, however, numerous stylized actions within the naturalistic behavior, such as bodies, presumably of the starved peasants, sliding slowly out of the wings at the end of “The Relief Committee,” or Connor’s little son, Donaill (Joseph Ward), crawling under the conference table at the start of that scene and sitting there wordlessly throughout as an indictment of the ineffectual and selfish actions of the officials. (I don’t know if these bits are indicated in Murphy’s script or were the invention of the director. The same, of course, is true of the set design.) The play, in fact, began with a stylized scene as part of the wake: a village woman (Treasa Ní Mhiolláin) started the play proper (after that silent preamble) by keening as each of the mourners arrived and exchanged a ritualized greeting with those already assembled. This occurred as a more naturalistic scene took place slightly down stage in what appeared to be a different location. Though I don’t know if all this stylistic variation is part of Murphy’s script or had been developed in the performance text by Hynes, the disparate aspects only rarely seemed to clash.

Druid’s acting company is truly remarkable. As hard as I found it to keep engaged in the play, I can’t fault the stage work of the cast. I’d really like to see this company in a different play such as one of the Synges in the 2006 series or last year’s O’Casey. It’s impossible to select one or two performances to praise, not only because the cast worked as a magnificent ensemble, building an acting environment to which they all contributed, but simply because they were all so equally accomplished that I wouldn’t be able to distinguish among them. I will spotlight one performance, though, but only because the actor had to adopt a physical impediment that must have been exceedingly hard. Aaron Monaghan as Mickeleen O’Leary, a crippled villager, bustled about the uneven terrain in what looked like mismatched forearm crutches as if he were a four-legged spider. (I kept getting the image of the Gollum from the Lord of the Rings films.) The actor’s physical work was astonishing—and amazingly compelling—but it never diminished Monaghan’s inner characterization, which was as total and constant as those of his castmates. Even though many of the cast took on multiple roles, they all established strong, consistent, and believable characters that never descended into stereotype or caricature. If it weren’t for the play’s unrelieved desolation, I’d never have been able to take my eyes off this ensemble, watching as they wove the cloth of this little community. Long-time readers of ROT will remember that this kind of acting thoroughly thrills me, as I explained in “Ensembles” (9 August 2010 on the blog).

The press was mostly complimentary in the same vein that I’ve been: that Druid’s acting was superb and that the achievement of bringing Murphy to the attention of New York audiences in such a high-profile way is laudatory. Most reviewers praised the whole series, reserving their greatest approval for the first two plays that I didn’t see and finding difficulties with Famine. For instance, Matt Windman wrote in AM New York that “‘DruidMurphy’ makes for an exceptional theatrical experience that is captivating despite offering endless hours of gloom and doom” but Soloski of the Voice advised that Famine, “with the political overwhelming the personal in many of the scenes,” is the “most complex, and yet least compelling offering in the cycle.” In Variety, Steven Suskin found that “Hynes, her designers and a strong cast of Irish actors makes the marathons exceptional viewing” and praised Famine as “compelling” and “evocative,” but warned that “non-Irish/English patrons at the marathons might have trouble keeping focused.” In Newsday, Linda Winer effused of dramatist Tom Murphy, “It is rare and a bit overwhelming to discover the existence of an artist with a mature and highly individual body of work.” Still, she called Famine “grueling,” but said as the last of the three plays, which Winer saw in the 9½-hour marathon, she found “the unflinching political and natural tragedy reverberates throughout the characters and uneasy national identities of the previous works.” Jason Fitzgerald of Back Stage, calling Famine “a long expressionist montage,” concluded that even though the author “connects the dots from emotional truth to historical and political experience,” it was “memorable but tiring, and Hynes' production can't hide its preciousness.”

In Time Out New York, David Cote described the whole repertory as “devastatingly good” (as well as “hugely ambitious”), but specified that the “semi-Brechtian” Famine was “a difficult sit.” Vincentelli of the Post described DruidMurphy as “easier to admire than to love” and characterized Famine as “nearly three hours of horror.” Dziemianowicz of the News designated “the superbly acted and staged” series as “all bruising works—some more powerfully than others” and agreed that Famine was “grim.” The New Yorker’s Scott Brown, dubbing the series “harrowing works,” noted that Famine was of a “vastly ambitious scale” compared to the other plays and warned that it was “for many reasons, the hardest to watch.” In the Times, Isherwood affirmed that “the plays easily transcend their surface nature as commentary on people of specific times and places” but warned that “‘Famine’ feels diffuse almost to the point of tedium” because, he suggested, “[i]t is easier to enter into the 20th-century worlds of the other plays than it is to engage with the rural Ireland of the 1840s.” The play “has its own rewards,” Isherwood declared, however, and it “never devolves into a dull history lesson or a preachy tract.”

Finally, because of the unique nature and provenance of this presentation, I thought it would be edifying and interesting to see what a local Irish paper thought of DruidMurphy, on the assumption—probably valid, as I think you’ll agree—that its reviewer might have a special sense of this writer and this troupe. (There are two well-known Irish weeklies in New York City, but the Irish Echo hadn’t run a review at the time I wrote this report.) Irish Voice review-writer Cahir O'Doherty, who admitted that “Druid Murphy is not just a highlight of my theater-going year; it’s been the highlight of my theatre-going life,” began his notice with a question:

Did you ever ask yourself how did every Irish town ended up [sic] with at least twenty public houses? Did you ever wonder how the rural landscape from Malin Head to Mizen Head came to be filled with deserted cottages, abandoned workhouses, burial plots, and broken down factories with tiny stone windows that only a crow could squeeze through?

This, O’Doherty explained, is what playwright Murphy has been contemplating over the span of his career: “what the rest of us have blithely overlooked, transfixed by the little details of our own lives.” The arts editor went on to say that the repertory was an “extraordinary mini-retrospective.” “I have never witnessed a more lucid theatrical exploration of the Irish experience on any stage,” O’Doherty pronounced. Famine, he asserted, was “the most shattering work” of the three “intensely provocative productions” and summed up his estimation of DruidMurphy as “the most defining statement on the legacy of the great hunger and its cultural and historical echoes that it has ever been my privilege to witness.”