Powered by Google
Home
Listings
Editors' Picks
News
Music
Movies
Food
Life
Arts + Books
Rec Room
Moonsigns
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Personals
Adult Personals
Classifieds
Adult Classifieds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
stuff@night
FNX Radio
Band Guide
MassWeb Printing
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About Us
Contact Us
Advertise With Us
Work For Us
Newsletter
RSS Feeds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Webmaster
Archives



sponsored links
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
PassionShop.com
Sex Toys - Adult  DVDs - Sexy  Lingerie


   
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend

Barnes storming
Abbey director explains the Playboy
BY CAROLYN CLAY

Director Ben Barnes doesn’t expect American audiences to throw stink bombs and potatoes at The Playboy of the Western World, as New Yorkers did when the play first appeared here, in 1911. And that episode of missile-flinging pique followed the riots that ensued when J.M. Synge’s raucous and poetic depiction of the Irish peasantry first hit Dublin’s Abbey Theatre stage in 1907, outraging patriots and moralists alike. But Barnes, who is artistic director of the Abbey and is helming a centenary production of the play that will open a three-week engagement at the Wilbur Theatre this Tuesday, cautions that Playboy is "not a museum piece" and that his is "a very physical, very vital production of the play. It’s not by any means an homage to Synge and the Playboy." He adds that the work is tailor-made for US consumption, being "a play about psychology, about a man who reinvents himself, which has a particular resonance for America."

For those unfamiliar with Synge’s classic: its protagonist, Christy Mahon, is a young man who shows up in the wilds of western County Mayo claiming to have killed his bullying father by whacking him in the pate with a spade. The heretofore undistinguished lad becomes a local hero on this report — until the dead dad shows up in a fury, his head swathed in bandages, forcing Christy to attack him again and prove to a village full of drunken men and sex-starved women that "there’s a great gap between a gallous story and a dirty deed." The work is irrevocably woven into the financially troubled Abbey’s venerable history, and Barnes (who will leave his post at the end of 2005) concedes that the theater never considered not making it a jewel of the centenary. "We’re producing 30 works and 100 events across three continents this year. But Playboy was one of the first things we put in place, because we felt that, along with The Plough and the Stars by O’Casey, it’s one of the two great signature plays of our repertoire. It would be like the Moscow Art Theatre celebrating a centenary and not doing Chekhov."

Barnes’s production, which opened in Galway in June, is marked "by the dynamic of the private and the public space." The "enclosed rectangle" of the tavern presided over by romance-hungry heroine Pegeen Mike opens onto "a more theatrical arena" that, for the confrontation between Christy and his amazingly resurrecting dad, "is more like a bullring." Barnes also touts Playboy’s "repressed sexuality. I’m talking about Pegeen Mike and the Widow Quin. There is a rivalry between Pegeen Mike and Widow Quin for Christy Mahon. There are also three village girls, and there’s an undercurrent there as well. It’s part of a female landscape where the men have not come up to expectations, so all their hopes are placed on the one character."

Barnes also directs opera, and that may explain why, he says, "we paid a lot of attention to the musicality of the language." On the other hand, he explains, "In staging terms, my own commitment as a director has moved me away from the flashy and elaborate. So what I do is very minimum in terms of the mise-en-scène, because I do believe what marks the theater out as a unique experience for people is that very immediate interaction between the story and the actors and the audience."

One thing that can be tricky about Playboy is its fluctuation between "extravagant comedy" and brewing heartbreak. Says Barnes, "I think it’s very important not to underplay or undersell the comedic potential of the piece. I think it’s always a difficulty trying to hold that in check. You have to allow for laughter in a play like Playboy, which brings you into the tragic heart more effectively. It’s very much a characteristic of Irish writing of that time, the coexistence of laughter and tears."

The Playboy of the Western World is presented by Broadway in Boston, in association with the Huntington Theatre Company, at the Wilbur Theatre, 246 Tremont Street, November 2 through 21. Tickets are $25.50 to $67.50; call (617) 931-ARTS, or visit the Wilbur box office.


Issue Date: October 29 - November 4, 2004
Back to the Editor's Picks table of contents
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend
 









about the phoenix |  advertising info |  Webmaster |  work for us
Copyright © 2005 Phoenix Media/Communications Group