August 2019
Upstairs
at the Irish Repertory Company, an
import from 2008 is making its NYC debut, Little Gem by Elaine Murphy. It’s
in the tradition of alternating monologue narrative plays popularized by Irish
authors like Brian Friel and Conor
MacPherson, who toil in-or-near the UK, where there’s also still a tradition of radio drama, from which
plays like these spring, and to which plays like these are sometimes adapted.
This one, to oversimplify, is about three approximately present-day generations
of working class women and their relationships with men—how those relationships
both define them and trigger their independence. Ms. Murphy takes a good, long time to
establish her narrative schema, but eventually it becomes clear that the three narrators are
related; in reverse order of appearance, they’re a grandmother (Marsha Mason), her middle-aged daughter
(Brenda Meany) and her early-20ish
granddaughter (Lauren O’Leary).
It’s
all very well done, under the direction of Marc
Atkinson Borrull, and the audience I was with
seemed vastly entertained; I, however, had a hard time engaging with it; in part
because the monologues lack verbal dazzle, and
because, as a result, I had to keep jump-starting my concentration, since the
performers never meaningfully interact. Your personal mileage may vary,
depending upon your tolerance for a play that’s really a staged novella.
Downstairs,
I (at least) found things to be more interesting and more interactive with Love, Noël, a 90-minute cabaret review sourced
from Noël Coward’s songs and letters, devised and written by Coward expert and
archivist Barry Day, starring two cabaret
mainstays, pianist-singer Steve Ross and
jazz-and-musical theatre chanteuse KT
Sullivan. Ross, at first implicitly, then more specifically, assumes the
role of Coward himself; Sullivan takes on a somewhat less defined interviewer
personality that also ducks into stylistic homages to some of Coward’s most
famous leading ladies, among them Gertrude Lawrence and Elaine Stritch. Both Ross and Sullivan are expert interpreters of this
kind of material, and within the parameters of the venue and the structure,
better character actors than you expect them to be. If I have a minor caveat,
it’s that sometimes, and only sometimes, Mr. Ross and Ms. Sullivan are too
self-conscious about comedy, pushing the jokes in the lyrical wordplay rather
than letting them drop into place easily and naturally. But it’s all quite
charming, and a little bit touching under the direction of Charlotte Moore, which is almost completely invisible…which is
exactly as it should be.
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