An old woman set among the pillows of a bed, her gnarled fingers wrapped around a mug of tea and a crust of bread, spins a tale in an endless loop — with a gap at the end. She has told this story of Bailegangaire, " the place without laughter, " so many times that her granddaughters know it by heart and can mimic every phrase, up to a point. Tonight one of them is determined that the story, a distancing link to a painful past, will at last find an end, allowing the old crone and her caretakers to move forward.
Bailegangaire, Irish playwright Tom Murphy told Boston magazine, " is a play in search of a plot. " The good news is that, after two elliptical acts, the 1985 work finds one, tying the peculiar and lyrical tale of a laughing competition to the shared bitterness chaining the play’s three women to a Beckettesque limbo in a Connaught backwater. Murphy came to prominence in Ireland in the 1960s but has proved less exportable than his contemporary, Brian Friel, or the generation-younger Conor McPherson and Martin McDonagh. (Although set in McDonagh’s wild west of Ireland, Bailegangaire echoes the McPherson theme of the power of storytelling.) For Súgán Theatre Company, however, this is the fourth foray into Murphy country, and artistic director Carmel O’Reilly’s production of the cryptic but exquisitely written play is sure-footed, with three crack performances and a mood-enhancing musical underlay masquerading as a Sunday radio concert.
It appears to be a Sunday evening in the kitchen of a thatched house in 1984 (though it could be 1884 to judge by some of the amenities). Mommo is the old crone prattling in the scullery bedstead, gray hair stringing from a stocking cap as she relates her quirky, conclusionless tale of a laughing contest in " a bad year for crops but a good year for mushrooms. " And you can’t stop her from telling her " nice story, " as she warns from the get-go, demonstrating a competition-worthy array of sniggers and cackles of her own.
Mary, Mommo’s primary caretaker, has difficulty penetrating the skin of the story to offer tea and cake to the bedridden woman, who seems not to know her. Dolly, the tarty younger granddaughter, who shows up bearing a motorcycle helmet and a bun in the oven, at least achieves recognition, in exchange for the sweets Mommo licks from their wrappers like a cat lapping cream. We’re in Beauty Queen of Leenane territory here, with the passive-aggressive old hag driving the younger women to desperation. But there will be no poker taken to Mommo; she will instead, this night, finally lead them all out of the shaggy-dog wilderness of her tale to what Mary hopes is " a place where we can find some new start. "
It takes Murphy a long while to connect the dots, and you can see the pencil coming. But there is subtlety in the way he fills in the foreground details (the repeatedly rejected tea, the chamber pot that must be emptied) while keeping the economically pressing background (a computer plant down the road, where Dolly’s pick-ups are picketing) vague. And in the end, the play has a bleak, purgative beauty that is redemptive. Moreover, under O’Reilly’s direction, it is very nicely performed, all its linguistic eccentricities and lonely corners probed.
As Mommo, weaving and reweaving the tale of the contest between a renowned local guffawer and a challenging " stranger, " Nancy E. Carroll is coarse yet poetic. Fingers peeking out of gloves to paw at candies, eyes shifting slyly as she hops among characters, she rises like a grizzled jazz musician to the hee-hee-hees and heekle-heekle-heekles of her mirthful climax, only to make the heartbreaking, heartbroken leap to the crux of the matter. Natalie Rose Liberace has the less bravura role of Mary, the granddaughter who escaped to a nursing career but has been drawn mysteriously, miserably home and is now determined to come through this dark night of blather to a new tomorrow. She carries herself with a parched yet lyrical grace, both conveying and containing her character’s despair. And as the spitfire younger granddaughter, Dolly, who finds herself pregnant in the absence of a husband who sends pay packets home from a job abroad and shows up once a year to beat her up, Judith McIntyre gives a blazing performance. The finally finished laughing contest ends tragically, but Bailegangaire arrives at a hope that would melt mean old Martin McDonagh like the Wicked Witch of the West.
