July 24-31,1996 Issue No. 44

Da
By Hugh Leonard. Dir. Charlotte Moore.
With Brian Murray and ensemble cast. Irish Repertory
Theater (see Off Broadway)
If you've been looking for a fresh spin on the old cliche first muttered by Cicero more than 2,000 years ago, then rush to the Irish Repertory Theater's sterling revival of Hugh Leonard's wispy comedy. "There's an Antichrist in the teapot", bellows Da (Brian Murray), having just plucked a hot kettle from the stove and burned himself. Cicero, be damned.

Written in 1973 as a semiautobiographical satire of Dublin's outer suburbs, Da did not recieve the same explosive critical and popular response on its home turf that it did five years later when it played New York - with Murray as Da's son Charlie. Debuting here at the Hudson Guild, Da quickly moved to Broadway, where it swept every major award short of the Pulitzer. That it was so decorated seems a bit surprising now. Not exactly a preeminent play, Da better resembles a charming, whimsical stroll down memory lane.

Drifting from past to present and location to location, Da begins on the day of its title character's funeral. Charlie, a playwright, has made a rare trip from London to take care of his father's possessions and pay his final respects. But even dead, Da's a feisty old crank, and he's not about to let Charlie off easily. So, without delay, he returns as an apparition ("If me heart hadn't gone on me last night, then I'd be alive today" he states), and sets about prodding Charlie to confront his past. There are other revenants as well, including his mum, a childhood chum, the local blonde bombshell (dubbed "the yellow peril" by mothers fearing for their sons' virginity), Charlie's stern old boss and a vision of himself as a young man.

With ghosts hanging around, time,place and logic are up for grabs, creating an ideal environment for the sort of ridiculous laughs that, to their credit, Leonard and director Charlotte Moore reist in both script and production. Da is funny because it strikes at the heart of human emotion - even at its most outrageous, it still rings true.
Well lit by Gregory Cohen, Shelly Barclay's simple set efficiently serves as numerous locales, and David Toser's costumes seem just right. While the eight cast members are all very effective (and Malcolm Adams as young Charlie is even affecting), there's only one Brian Murray - and he's fantastic. Part cantankerous old coot, part mischievous boy, his Da is a bubbling putty-faced delight.

- Sam Whitehead

July 22-28, 1996.

DA
Nearly 20 years after sweeping Broadway's malor awards, Hugh Leonard's "Da" should have resonance for a new audience of baby boomers confronting strained relationships with aging parents. Not that the Irish Repertory Theater's new production needs the demographic boost: "Da" would be a success all on its own, thanks to a uniformly excellent cast that nails every one of the play's multitude of genuinely funny lines.

But boomers are sure to find more than one instance in which the lives of the characters touch on their own. With his down-to-earth Irish smarts,Leonard gives the lie to Tolstoy's famous observation: This unhappy family is unhappy in ways that many audience members will recognise. Leading the way for this particular unhappy family is Brian Murray who, in the title role, lights up the stage from the moment he pops into a doorway - the evening's first big laugh despite an awful make-up job that makes him look more corpse than spirit.

As Da's angry son, Charlie (the role Murray created in the original New York production), Ciaran O'Reilly does a fine job of setting up most of Da's punchlines, while also generating a large portion of the play's humor and angst. Malcolm Adams' bursting-at-the-seams performance as Charlie's boyhood self offers a smartly defined physical contrast to O'Reilly's contained adult Charlie. Coming close to stealing the show are Aideen O'Kelly as Charlie's self-pitying mother and John Leighton, whose deadpan delivery as Charlie's intellectual mentor, Drumm, catches the audience off-guard more than once.

Director Charlotte Moore wisely keeps the production focused on Charlie's grievances without letting the anger becoming heavy-handed, just as she allows the humor to come through unforced. She and set desinger Shelly Barclay turn the theater's limited performance space into an appropriately cramped living quarters in which family members drive one another crazy as a collection of saintly books and stautes look on. Gregory Cohen's subdued lighting casts a fittingly warm glow over the scene, appropriate since most of the play takes place in Charlie's memory.

-Howard Waxman

Friday, July 19, 1996

Like Father, Like Son and Vice Versa
by Ben Brantley

At some point in his life, nearly every man nervously asks himself how long he has before he turns into his father. The speculation rears its ugly head in "Da", Hugh Leonard's Tony-winning, autobiographical play, and it gets a specific response (at least in terms of theater chronology) in the sturdy new revival of the work at the Irish Repertory Theater. The answer, for the record, is 18 years. At least that's the time that has elapsed since that fine, protean actor Brian Murray first appeared in the play (in the 1978 Hudson Guild production that transferred to Broadway) as the son of the title character. Now Mr Murray, with silver locks and eyebrows like cotton balls, has returned in the form of Da himself. And Mr Leonard's wistful reflections on the stranglehold of memory take on dimensions the author probably never anticipated.
As written, "Da" is crowded with ghosts: of both the dead and younger selves of the narrator, Charlie (now portrayed by Ciaran O'Reilly), an expatriate writer who returns to his hometown in provincial Ireland to bury his adoptive father, a peasant-like gardener of meagre ambitions and maddeningly bovine contentment. This production, for better or worse, must also make room for a whole new array of phantoms: of Barnard Hughes's and Mr Murray's marvelous performances as New York's original Da and Charlie, as well as that of Lester Rawlings as Charlie's dour, pedantic employer, Drumm, who ( devoted fans will recall) got his own play two years later in "A Life", with the superb Roy Dotrice in the same part.

It's all enough to make this "Da" a rather congested sentimental journey for theatergoers with long memories. And to succed fully, the production, diected by Charlotte More, needs to exorcise the spirits of performances past, which it never quite manages to do. Even audiences coming to "Da" for the first time may feel a touch of something lacking. This version has been handsomely mounted, cleanly executed and solidly cast, but it only fitfully achieves the musical flow that Mr Leonard's haunted study of filial ambivalence demands.

Eighteen years ago, Mr Murray played Charlie as an invigorating mix of exaspertion, affection and self-lacerating intellectual distance. Locked in a never-ending dialogue with his father's all too lively spectre, his character exuded a prickly air of irony, both comic and heartbreaking, that was the ideal foil for Mr Hughes's invincibly unselfconscious Da. The problem with Mr Murray's Da is that the sense of an actor looking at himself, which served Charlie very well, persists here. Mr Hughes's 1978 interprtetation, which suggested a desiccated grasshopper brought back to life, was both stolid and sly. So is Mr Murray's. But Mr Hughes, who won a tony for his performance, never winked at his character. With Mr Murray, there's often the feeling of a comic construct and of the actorly intelligence behind it. Ruddy-cheeked and blustery, this Da has more than a touch of the Dickensian gargoyle. So the scene in which the gentle-tempered Da erupts into violence over the prospec t of his wife (here played by Aideen O'Kelly) will see a former beau was shocking on Broadway in a way it can't be here.

Playing passive (or, for that matter, impassive) is not the strong suit of Mr Murray, who can wander into restless mugging. Mr Hughes stole sidewise, as it were, into our affections; Mr Murray launches something closer to a full-frontal attack. He is often very funny and, on occassion, very touching indeed. But he never becomes "the wasp", buzzing inside his son's mind, that Charlie accuses him of being. Playing opposite a man who once played your part must be disorienting. As Charlie, Mr O'Reilly has a steadying sense of calm, however, and he doesn't over do the potentially sticky Irish lyricism. Malcolm Adams is fine as younger Charlie projecting the essential sense of shame at being ashamed that most adolescents feel about their families, and the two actors achieve a winning, double-edged rapport as one man's past and present selves.
Equally solid are Ms O'Kelly and John Leighton (looking like T.S. Elliot in the role of the pedantic Drumm). The excellent Julia Gibson appears memorably as a local girl of easy virtue, in a scene that beautifully achieves the orchestral balance of voices that is the play's greatest asset. This doesn't happen often enough. It's hard to fault Shelley Barclay's perfectly detailed Irish kitchen of a set, but the intimacy of the Rep's theater actually seems to work against the production. It remains fixed in homespun naturalism when it should be floating on an impressionistic tide.

All that said, the considerable virtues of Mr Leonard's play remain apparent. If it is cruder than the more wilfully poetic works on similiar themes by Brian Friel, it never opts for facile sentiment or contempt, understanding that "love turned upside down is love for all that". When in this production's most affecting moment, Charlie finally leaves home for good, the image of Mr Murray's big, beaming face, peeking from behind a doorway, is a magnet that draws and repels with equal strength. It is a painfully familiar scene for any grown child who dies a little every time he says goodbye to his parents.