Midway between Galway and Dublin lie the enchanted and cursed hills of the " Midlands, " Irish playwright Marina Carr’s home turf and the setting for her incestuous family drama On Raftery’s Hill, which will be presented by the Súgán Theatre Company beginning next Saturday. Súgán produced Carr’s Portia Coughlan in 1998; this staging of On Raftery’s Hill will be the first by an America company (the original Druid/Royal Court production was imported to the Kennedy Center in 2000).
The Rafterys are a farming family, but something’s gone terribly wrong. Dead livestock litter the pastures, and patriarch Red Raftery rules over the domain — as well as his daughters, Dinah and Sorrel, and his senescent mother — with casual cruelty and great vigor. Sorrel may escape, as there’s a betrothal in the works. Or perhaps she won’t. Such uncertainty is part and parcel of Carr’s general themes, which include questionable parentage, incest, and hard living. As the play unfolds, it also becomes clear that the bleak and challenging environment is an immutable influence on everyone’s emotional climate. Raftery’s Hill isn’t just isolated — it’s the kind of place that makes Cold Comfort Farm look like a snug little pub smack in the middle of a metropolis.
" It’s a story of three generations within this very limited landscape, " explains Súgán artistic director Carmel O’Reilly, who appears in the production as the grandmother. " They’re trapped there by some very dark secrets. One is incest, though that doesn’t drive the play. It’s really about these deep and complex relationships that carry on in families. "
Some critics have likened On Raftery’s Hill to work by Eugene O’Neill, who was also fascinated by clans riven by madness and its deadly by-products. " I think what the play does more than O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms is capture the love that all these family members have for one another, " says the play’s director, Eric C. Engel.
One of Carr’s stylistic signatures is phonetic diction. Early on, Dinah decries a nearby community and offers to warm her grandmother’s feet: " Kinneygar, Kinneygar. Thah thick fah kip of a town. Even the dogs apologize for comin from there. Come on, Granny, till I warm the blue ouh a them feeh aor I’ll have to take a chainsaw to them. " Carr, who is in her late 30s, told a reporter in 1998, " The English we speak in Ireland is called Hibernal English, and it is very informed by the Irish language in its construction of sentences, its grammatical structure. "
For Engel, guiding his cast through a thicket of phonemes is just another element of the rehearsal process. " As the actors become more invested in their circumstances, the language becomes part of the fabric of the piece, The ‘size’ of the language, if you will, invites the actors to make incredibly deep and passionate choices. "
" That dark world is totally illuminated by the extraordinary language Marina Carr uses, " adds O’Reilly. " Her images are powerful, and she throws words like gobs of paint. "
" This particular piece is like doing Greek drama in terms of the size of the language, " Engel concludes. " She covers Biblical imagery and images from Greek mythology and makes incredible parallels between the rape of the landscape and the rape of our souls. You can look at any one of these characters and say they’re a perpetrator and a victim, and yet every single one of the characters is aware of their own responsibility for their own behavior. "
On Raftery’s Hill is presented by Súgán Theatre Company at the Boston Center for the Arts March 28 through April 19. Tickets are $24 to $29; call (617) 426-2787.
