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Dubliners
Súgán’s Howie the Rookie is an uneven ride
BY CAROLYN CLAY

Howie the Rookie
By Mark O’Rowe. Directed by Carmel O’Reilly. Set by J. Michael Griggs. Lighting by Tess James. Costumes by Sarah Chapman. With Kevin Steinberg and Billy Meleady. Presented by Súgán Theatre Company at the Boston Center for the Arts through February 15.


Another display of Irish storytelling trying to soar into theater, Howie the Rookie isn’t very pretty. Neither is it meant to be. Fueled by a scabrous, staccato poetry, Mark O’Rowe’s 1999 play takes us on a brute anything-but-joy-ride across the underbelly of North Dublin, a turf characterized by language that’s quirky and rhythmic wrapped around experience that’s callously, casually, and perhaps redemptively violent.

Told in separate monologues by rancorous young thugs "The Howie" Lee and "The Rookie" Lee (they’re unrelated, though they share the sir name of "The Bruce"), Howie the Rookie is, as Dickens might say, a tale of two evenings. It lurches from male brutality to male bonding and back, including along the way the Joycean specifics of every piss, puke, pint, fart, fuck, and stench experienced by the participants. Both the argot, which sometimes screams for translation, and the reported carnage, which simply screams, are coarsely compelling. But the play, as presented in its New England premiere by Súgán Theatre Company, is out of balance. The Howie’s part is slack, whereas the Rookie’s, delivered by a too old but believably roguish and hapless Billy Meleady, bristles.

O’Rowe’s play, which mixes Conor McPherson (particularly This Lime Tree Bower) with Irvine Welsh with Ulysses in Nighttown, won a number of prizes when it was produced in London and Edinburgh, including the 1999 Rooney Award for Irish Literature and the 2000 Irish Times New Play of the Year Award. It had a well-received Off Off Broadway run, with the original Irish cast, two years ago. What makes the work interesting is less O’Rowe’s seamy story, which begins with the burning of a scabies-infested mattress and ends in human sacrifice, than the way in which the playwright converts the vulgar, dehumanizing petty-hoodlum patois of the North Dublin projects into energetic near-poetry. His is a vernacular — suggestive of early David Mamet bludgeoned with a shamrock — in which rat-a-tat profanity coexists with such pungent affectations as "skullduggerous."

At Súgán, under the straightforward direction of Carmel O’Reilly, the play gets off to a troubled start, with Kevin Steinberg flattening the Howie into a sort of soft-spoken, insinuating skinhead lacking the propulsion of O’Rowe’s language. Bouncing up against a wall of chain link, feigning masturbation on a metal bed frame, flexing impressively rippling muscles and sporting tattoos seemingly inspired by barbed wire, Steinberg looks the part. But there’s something wooden (and sometimes incomprehensible) in his relation of an evening’s idle on the urban dung heap, which moves from the affront of the infested mattress to "going after" the Rookie, who may or may not have been responsible for the contamination, to random tragedy. It is this last that breaks through the Howie’s sadistic exterior, turning him into the brawling Christ figure of the Rookie’s post-intermission narrative.

Meleady is alternately preening and terrified as the Rookie, a lowlife ladies’ man who’s in big trouble for accidentally stomping the life out of the Siamese fighting fish prized by a gangster with three rows of teeth like a shark who’s incongruously called Lady Boy. Now the Rookie needs to come up with the 500-quid replacement cost or get his kneecaps shot off. On top of that, he’s plagued by crotch itch and fear-inspired farts that would melt paint.

In Meleady’s livelier rendering, the lilting, visceral language in which O’Rowe frames his unsavory story takes on more commanding life, the actor’s perky, amoral brazenness bringing out the rude humor that bumps shoulders in the piece with nasty dust-ups and mechanical sex. You actually like the woman-using, scabies-scratching, intestinally terrified the Rookie, and that’s appalling. So is the climactic, flesh-tearing, one-on-one fight the character recounts, in which the Howie mysteriously repays the Rookie’s debt to Lady Boy and redeems himself in "blood and bone." The audience is left with the disturbing question, is this myth in the making or just another night in the neighborhood?

Issue Date: January 31 - February 5, 2003
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