John Patrick Shanley has written more than 23 plays and nine screenplays, several adapted from his plays. He is probably best known for the play Doubt: A Parable, for which he also adapted the screenplay and the libretto for an opera, and the film Moonstruck, not adapted from a play, for which his screenplay won an Academy Award.
West End Players Guild is performing a less known Shanley play, Outside Mullingar, from which he also adapted the screenplay for Wild Mountain Thyme. Outside Mullingar is a romantic comedy with dark edges, much like Moonstruck, not at all like Doubt: A Parable.
Shanley, who comes from an Irish-American family in the Bronx, sets Outside Mulligar among the rural Irish farms near the fictional village of Mullingar. Like much of Ireland, it is lovely country, but it is not exactly flowing with milk and money, blessing the inhabitants with prosperity. They are hard-working, poor people. But they have that Irish charm with its gifts for language and for imaginative excess that blesses, if not all Irish people, most Irish people on the stage.
The Reillys and the Muldoons have for generations lived on neighboring farms. As seems essential in an Irish play, the Irish obsession with ownership of land creates one ot the dark edges in the play. In a moment of extreme hardship, Tony Reilly, the current head of the family, sold a strip of forty meters of his farm to Chris Muldoon, the head of the neighboring family. For some reason, and I never did get a satisfactory explanation for why Reilly would sell that particular plot of land, it cuts right across the Reilly’s right-of-way from their house to the road passing in front of it. And Muldoon has fenced in that plot, with two gates, which the Reillys must open first to get on Multoon’s property and then to get onto their own, and each opening and closing of gates twists again the pain and humiliation of the loss. Again, these seem to be another stage Irish convention.
However, the two families seem to get along all right, even though the Muldoons continue to reject Reilly’s offers to buy back the land. As the play opens on the day of Chris Muldoon’s funeral, his widow Aoife comes to visit Tony Reilly. He again makes the offer, which she at first thinks is a proposal of marriage – not entirely outlandish in the circumstances – and then refuses, pointing out that that land has been left to her daughter Rosemary.
Rosemary has come with her mother but is waiting outside under a shed in the rain – this is Ireland — and Tony’s son Anthony joins her, not wishing to stay any longer with his father, who had been talking to him about not leaving the farm to Anthony but to a nephew in America, to whom Tony would sell the farm, keeping it in the family, and giving the money to Anthony; because, Tony said, Anthony was not really a farmer: he didn’t stand on the land, rooted in it. Anthony might agree with that assessment. Still, he had spent his life working this land, and he was insulted that it might not be his.
As Rosemary and Anthony talk, we sense that, despite her expressed grudge against Anthony for having pushed her down to the ground in some childish fit when she was six and he a much larger twelve, that grudge has become a defense against expressing her real feeling for him. And he bemoans his loneliness.
In this sparsely populated rural area there are no two more attractive people than these two were young and still are as they approach forty. But it takes three years and the deaths of both remaining parents for them finally to knock down the barriers each has erected before the other. Rosemary’s go down easily, and she takes the lead in bringing them together. Anthony has to admit that he thinks he’s crazy and what the craziness’s fantastical shape is. If you’ve seen Moonstruck, you know how well Shanley can make such scenes lyrical and convincing.
The Players Guild’s cast is well suited to this play, with Jessa Knust’s careful direction. Colleen Backer brings all her usual charm and its impressive range to Rosemary. Jason Meyers is, as always, intensely alive as Anthony. Jodi Stockton beautifully modulates her playing of Aoife Muldoon’s scene with Brad Slavik’s Tony Reilly. Slavik warmly presents the contradictions in his character.
Jacob Winslow’s set gives us two poor Irish cottages, decorated appropriately, with an intriguing changing of parts of the set while we watched to convert the Reilly kitchen to the Muldoon kitchen. I never was clear how the shed where Rosemary and Anthony met was related to the Reilly kitchen, or if it was, as I don’t remember that its door was ever used to enter or exit that part of the house. Karen Pierce’s lighting nicely portrayed the rainy gloom at the shed, as well as the brightness of the kitchens. Tracey Newcomb’s costumes fit both characters and actors. Morgan Maul-Smith’s sound design complemented the action, and director Knust provided props.
West End Players Guild’s production of Shanley’s Outside Mulingar maintained the playwright’s lyricism, seriousness, and whimsy.
—Bob Wilcox
Photo by John Lamb
Colleen Backer as Rosemary Muldoon and Jason Meyers as Anthony Reilly in Outside Mulingar.
