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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

The season of Seán O’Casey

February 22, 2019 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, I review an important off-Broadway revival of Seán O’Casey’s The Shadow of a Gunman. Here’s an excerpt.

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In Ireland, Seán O’Casey is a great writer. In America, he’s a footnote, a playwright whose name is known to everyone who loves Irish drama but whose work has never quite caught on over here. Only two of O’Casey’s plays, “Juno and the Paycock” (1924) and “The Plough and the Stars” (1926), continue to be staged in this country, and it’s been more than 30 years since either of them was last seen on Broadway. Now, though, the Irish Repertory Theatre, New York’s foremost off-Broadway troupe, is celebrating its thirtieth season by presenting “Juno,” “Plough” and “The Shadow of a Gunman,” O’Casey’s first successful play, in repertory. These three plays, collectively known as the Dublin Trilogy, constitute a major artistic achievement by any imaginable standard, and judging by Ciarán O’Reilly’s stunning revival of “Shadow,” the first of the three to open, it looks like the Irish Rep’s O’Casey Season (which includes readings of his other plays) will be an equally major theatrical event in its own right.

First performed in 1923 and set three years earlier, at the height of the Irish War of Independence, “Shadow” is a portrait of a country convulsed by political violence. It is also—characteristically for O’Casey—a tragedy disguised as a comedy. (As one of the characters explains, it is the way of the Irish to “treat a joke as a serious thing and a serious thing as a joke.”) The action takes place in a grubby one-room Dublin tenement flat that is shared by Seumas (Michael Mellamphy), a door-to-door salesman and booze-soaked blowhard, and Donal (James Russell), a Shelley-spouting, politics-shunning poet whose attempts to write are constantly being short-circuited by the building’s other tenants….

What wrenches “Shadow” out of the smiling land of comedy is the fact that Donal’s fellow tenants have somehow come to the mistaken conclusion that he is an IRA gunman in hiding. He goes along with this crackbrained notion, partly because it’s easier to do so and partly because it pleases him to be treated with the kowtowing respect due to such a personage. “What danger can there be in being the shadow of a gunman?” he asks himself, not realizing that in a country whose people have tasted the insane root of irredentist politics and been corrupted by its seductive flavor, such misconceptions can lead to tragedy with perilous quickness….

Mr. O’Reilly, the Irish Rep’s producing director, has a long and unbroken track record of artistic distinction, and this production is up to his now-familiar high standards….

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Read the whole thing here.

A featurette about the Irish Rep’s revival of The Shadow of a Gunman:

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Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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