If you like your Christmas holiday fare free of treacle then this is the show for you. No annoyingly twee children shouting out carols in bad English accents and no sticky sugar plums to get stuck in the teeth. It’s Scrooge meets his past, present, and future on barstools.
The Irish pub becomes purgatory and confessional, a place both of escape and a place one can call home. It’s a “carol” true enough, but one for 21st century adults.
An Irish Carol was written by company member Matthew J. Keenan (who also designed a most authentic pub as set) and was first produced by Keegan Theatre in December 2011. You can tell Keenan not only has come across the pond and brought the Irish gift of the gab, but he has written for this theatre family, whose members have delivered it for him and each other for the last eight years. The actors all have honed the music of this fine work like a fine troupe of chamber musicians.
A few of the actors have been switched out or around, but the show remains remains tight, and it’s delicious to watch the details played out in the familiarity of a true ensemble company at work. Director Mark A. Rhea, who also plays Jim, allows it to unfold slowly, something rare in the theater these days. It’s as if we are indeed in the same pub, spending an evening leisurely with friends.
For those readers who have not yet been to Keegan’s Christmas show, it’s somewhat gritty with equal measure jokes and “feckin’” Irish expletives. Let me give you a rundown of some of the characters you’ll meet.
One by one they enter the pub, most through the doorway which when opened gives us a rush of bitter winter wind (sound design by Jake Null makes for a character on its own.) It makes almost every one of the characters swear, and the wind and the swearing together time after time is both a musical motif and funny in itself.
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There’s David, the pub owner – a role owned by Kevin Adams since its inception. David is the play’s Scrooge, a bitter man of sharp tongue, whose whole demeanor has twisted and turned the man inward and smouldering. Even when he’s smoking outside, we see him churning with old grievances and his diminished business. He is like some bass wind player, blaring out almost comically deep low notes, sounding even at times like Eyeore, a great unhappy mess of a creature. Like Dickens’ Scrooge, David drives his poor assistant without any regard for the man’s humanity.
Bartek is the assistant, not in this version a scrivener but an immigrant bartender. Josh Adams plays the young Polish man still struggling with the language and his place in this new world. The man, we learn, has a wife and an autistic child, and they live in one furnished room. Adams gets just the right blend of someone desperate to keep his head above water but whose innate goodness accepts his world and everyone in it with cheer and grace.
Jim and Frank enter the pub pretty much on the heels of each other. These are the regulars: Jim may be there to avoid his wife, and Frank has nowhere else to go. Rhea plays Jim in a quiet, most minimal rendering of a character. He compels one to lean in on his conversation. But his Jim understands things deeply and lets us in on the fact that David, like Scrooge, neglected to attend to matters of the heart early on that lost him his love, and suddenly our criticism of the man turns to pity.
Timothy Hayes Lynch gives us the wittiest rendition of a barfly I’ve encountered on stage. He enters with bravura, wearing a silly Santa hat. He’s determined to be the life of the party. His one line commentary throughout the proceedings is full of zingers. Even funnier are the detailed moments of physical clowning – as he exits the “loo”, zipping up his pants and shaking a leg to dislodge the last beer-discharged drops, and later eating peanuts and simultaneously grinning mischievously out of one side of his mouth. Lynch and Keenan have created a “classic” right out of the great Irish tradition of boasting yet pitiable rogues.
Michael, played by Jon Townson, enters the pub with what appears at first to be a desperate “ask” of older brother David. But it turns out, just as Frank tells it, Michael, like Scrooge’s nephew in the original, has just come to invite his kin to Christmas dinner at his house with family. Townson is incredibly appealing in the role, almost tearfully pleading with his brother to turn him around. Anyone who has family or loved ones who remain adamantly estranged knows how heartbreaking this can be, and Townson plays this razor’s edge between frustration and sorrow in a signature scene of the evening.
Josh Sticklin and Caroline Dubberly enter, and their characters offer a couple of key plot points to the play. (I was suddenly aware that everything before their entrance has been a remarkably deft treatment of exposition and atmosphere.) Simon, David’s former bartender now made “yuppie good,” has come to show off his new fiancée, but more importantly to make David an offer to buy his pub out from under him and add it to his well-oiled chain. David tells him in no uncertain terms what he can do with that offer.
Sticklin is an actor with remarkable resources and matured prowess. In this supportive role, he demonstrates a kind of wound-up, go-for-it ambition that makes Simon unable to back down or tend to other things he needs to in his life.
Caroline Dubberly plays Anna, and she brings much needed oxygen into a room filled with old soiled lives and repeated self-sabotaging patterns. I was very taken with her nuanced filling out of this straight and good character. She managed to be both touching and tough, challenging yet generous.
Finally, Mick Tinder (Richard) shows up as the former friend who ended up getting the girl who was once David’s girlfriend. Richard’s wife, the woman in question, has died a year ago Christmas Eve. Richard has been sent on a special mission and turns up at David’s pub. Their scene is as close to a straight dramatic scene fueled by conflict in the play. Will Richard break through this barnacled and otherwise armored old man?
Not to force the issue too much, but my brain began to spin more parallel structures in Keenan’s slice-o’Irish-life to Dickens’ tale. I interpreted Richard as Christmas Past, for it is he who brings up their entangled history with Bernie and shows him what might have been. Simon with all his wheeling-and-dealing shows up to bribe David may stand for a possible Christmas Present. Perhaps it’s Frank, in a terrific monologue, who delivers a complete reckoning (thus a bleak peek at Christmas Future,) conjuring the image of Frank’s own father who, mean and reclusive, died alone with no one caring. The monologue and Frank’s own character makes David and all of us examine our lives to discern what is important.
The play moves through challenges and confrontations, confessions and revelations, and we get to know these characters well. But they never succumb to sentimentality. This is Ireland for real, and laced through the play is the story of an embattled people, who have gone through tough times and are facing them again, but whose resilience comes from their friendships (despite “feck all”) and rich tradition of sharing stories.
The ending? Let’s just say decency is restored, and there is modest redemption with the merest sprinkle of holiday spirit. But the moral of this story may just be we are who we are, but we might just let a little bit more light shine.
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An Irish Carol. Written by Matthew J. Keenan. Directed by Mark A. Rhea. Set Design by Matthew J. Kennan. Lighting Design by Dan Martin. Costume Design by Kelly Peacock. Sound Design by Jake Null. With Kevin Adams, Josh Adams, Mark A. Rhea, Timothy Hayes Lynch, Jon Townson, Josh Sticklin, Caroline Dubberly, and Mark Tinder. Produced by Keegan Theatre. Reviewed by Susan Galbraith.
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