Maryann Plunkett and Ciaran O'Reilly (photo credit: Carol Rosegg)
What Sean O’Casey’s political tragicomedy “Juno and
the Paycock” lacks in plot, it makes up for in characterization. Under Neil
Pepe’s splendid direction for the Irish Repertory Theatre, characterization
gets its due. Pepe, who is currently the Artistic Director of the Atlantic
Theater Company, has made the O’Casey play resound with a riveting ferocity. O’Casey
wrote the terrifically subversive play in 1924 eight years after the Easter
Uprising of 1916, and only two years after the terrible Civil War. He labeled
it rightly “a tragedy.”
That may be true enough, but the bracing lyrical humor
of its lowly Irish folk is expressed on such a high and impressively theatrical
plane that it serves to empower rather than to defuse their disconsolate lives
and the tragedies that befall them.
The story of a chaotic family that misguidedly lives
on credit in the false belief they have come into an inheritance is a doozy. The
play’s power in how it provides the full flavor of the Irishness that so richly
pervades and energizes this production. Enfolded within designer Charlie
Corcoran’s stunningly dingy set and enhanced by the dowdy costumes from co-designers
Linda Fisher and David Toserand, the major and peripheral players mine the
blasts of poetry even in the midst of the play’s abject realism.
Maryann Plunkett’s tough-love-performance as Juno the
razor-sharp wife and mother of an impoverished Dublin family is extraordinary
in its poignant simplicity. It frames Juno’s passionately Catholic instincts with
the stirring sobriety of her pagan goddess namesake. Ciaran O’Reilly is vaingloriously
blustery as the ale-bloated blarney-spouting Captain Jack Boyle, the “Paycock”
who, citing the questionable pains in his legs as an excuse, refuses to look
for work even when it falls into his lap.
As Joxer Daly, the Captain’s drinking partner, John
Keating suggests the duplicity of fragile relationships, as he polishes off
more than poetic quotations and half-remembered songs. Ed Malone gives a
passionate and poignant portrayal of the wounded son Johnny, who suffers from
nightmares and hallucinations, but who has more to worry about when his
allegiance to the Irish Republican Brotherhood is questioned.
Sarah Street affixes a beautifully plaintive courage
to the role of Mary, the family’s main provider and a member of the currently
striking union. Spurning her ardent wooer Jerry Devine (Harry Smith),Mary is
seduced and abandoned by Charles Bentham (slickly played by James Russell), a
school-teacher and lawyer who brings the news of Jack’s inheritance, and
without warning leaves town when the windfall falls through.
The play has its melodramatic digressions, such as the
extended scene in which the mourning Mrs. Tancred, (wrenchingly played by Una
Clancy) details the murder of her activist son to the Boyle family while on the
way to his funeral. The somber tone is well times put a damper on an impromptu songfest in which the
Boyles and their obstreperous neighbor Maisie Madigan (a terrific Terry
Donnelly) display a little harmonic a capella virtuosity.
But it remains for the virtuosity of O’Casey’s writing
to take us from boisterous comedy to dispiriting situations, to tragic results,
and yet leave us with a sense of the heroic. This, in the person of Juno, who,
unlike her loafer of a husband, sees “the whole world in a state o chassis!” (a
corruption of the word chaos) and remains indomitable and a survivor.
