The Gigolo Confessions of Baile Breag
Reviewed By: Caroline Burlingham Ellis
It can be exciting to see a promising talent emerge
-- for example, the young playwright of The Gigolo
Confessions of Baile Breag, now in its world premiere
at the Boston Center for the Arts. In Ronan Noone's
final installment of his Baile trilogy, all about
the consequences of sexual repression in Ireland,
the writer moves forward in the quest to establish
his own artistic voice.
The W.B. Yeats poem quoted in the program, "Purgatory,"
gives a hint of the play's content. Noone's characters
"re-live their transgressions, and that not once
but many times." The main transgressors here
are Paddy (Billy Meleady), who once ran a thriving
gigolo business for unloved and unappreciated married
women; Rosie (Judith McIntyre), who both loves and
hates Paddy; and William (Miguel Cervantes), a younger
man whom Paddy talks into becoming a gigolo, with
disastrous consequences. Other roles are assumed periodically
by Cervantes, who metamorphoses for example into Rosie's
father, "a religious, mad chicken farmer"
with the palsy.
As the play opens, Paddy and Rosie are living in Amsterdam,
whither they have carried the heartache they had hoped
to leave in the village of Baile Breag. Paddy is drinking
too much, Rosie is paying strangers for sex, and Paddy
decides that an explanation of his past life will
clear the air. His revelations are half-truths of
the type that the slightly penitent might confess
in order to receive a priest's absolution. But Rosie
has revelations of her own, and she uses their shock
value to get more of the truth from Paddy.
All the trouble could be said to start with Rosie's
father, a Roman Catholic fanatic so repressed that
he has sex with his wife only once and then, in revulsion,
prays to God for forgiveness. Rosie's mother, finding
this sort of thing inadequate to her needs, absconds
and makes "adultery a way of life." Over
the years, Rosie looks after her increasingly unstable
father -- until he commits an unforgivable crime.
Most of the narration is focused on Paddy's conversion
of young William to the gigolo business and the role
that the conversion plays in driving the gentle William
mad, too. Throughout, Paddy is in denial that anything
he has done or failed to do could have caused so many
people to die unnecessarily in Baile Breag. He shrugs
it all off, and he drinks.
Rosie cuts him no slack but she, too, has contributed
to the tragedies. Noone, who came to America from
Ireland in 1994 and is now a citizen, shows us the
self-deceptive and destructive side of his Irish characters.
In a moment that seems to sum up the play's message,
the murder of an innocent is turned into an ironic
little song and dance. Some might say that creating
songs out of tragedy is a strength that helps the
Irish survive but Noone sees a dark side -- people
who shirk blame and responsibility, people who just
raise a pint and call for a song or a tale.
Unfortunately, the elements of the plot tend to distract
from the play's compelling theme. How can a playwright
keep a shocking story element from assuming the triviality
of a soap opera episode? Look at Edward Albee's Who's
Afraid of Virginia Woolf? In that play, it's not the
killing of George and Martha's (imaginary) child that's
powerful but, rather, what the husband and wife do
to each other in order to stay connected. Perhaps
if Noone were less focused on what's wrong with Ireland
and how his characters demonstrate that, the play
would be stronger. Though the characters are given
snappy dialogue that's splendidly delivered by Meleady,
McIntyre, and Cervantes, they still come across as
cultural symbols.
Carmel O'Reilly, the heart and soul of Súgán
Theater (a group "dedicated to the production
of contemporary plays that draw from the well of Irish
and Celtic culture"), directs the production.
Kate Snodgrass, artistic director of Boston University's
Boston Playwrights' Theatre and a mentor to Noone,
is dramaturg. The simple and effective translucent
screens that form the set are designed by Richard
Chambers. Costume design is by Frances Nelson McSherry
and lighting by Daniel Meeker. Haddon
Kime created the sound effects -- traditional Irish
songs, sea birds, ocean waves, whispered rosaries
-- and also the original music.
Allow plenty of time to get the theater: There is
no parking to be had in Boston's South End for love
or money. |
