FOUND IN TRANSLATIONS

“There are, it may be hinted, several sides to The Playboy.” So wrote playwright J. M. Synge in 1907 regarding The Playboy of the Western World, for my money the greatest (whatever that means!) of all Irish plays. “On the stage one must have reality, and one must have joy,” Synge wrote in his Preface to the play—perhaps not the formula that every play should follow . . . but it certainly worked for him in his richly ambiguous “extravaganza” (as he described it).

And in its own way (though the “joy” is a bit muted) it worked for Brian Friel in Translations, his 1980 masterpiece that, in my humble opinion, ranks a close second to Playboy in the many-splendored catalogue of Irish drama. I was reminded of that last night when I attended a production of Translations staged by the Boston College Theatre Department. Employing only two equity actors, it was nonetheless an altogether compelling production, thanks in no small part to the guidance of director Carmel O’Reilly, who really drew out the talents of the student actors. The founder (with her husband Peter) of Boston’s now dormant Súgán Theatre Company, Carmel has directed literally countless plays, both at Súgán and for other Boston companies, and has received much recognition and many honors in the process. She is this year’s Monan Professor of Theatre Arts at Boston College.

Before last night, I had seen Translations performed two times: a disastrous mainstage production back in 1995 that starred TV actor Brian Dennehy (it had a short test run in Boston and then rightly got run off Broadway in less than two weeks), and a much more modest but still very satisfying production by the Devanaughn Theatre Company in 2004 in the intimate 50-seat Piano Factory Theatre in Boston’s South End. Last night’s production, in the Bonn Studio Theatre of BC’s Robsham Theater Arts Center, was still “intimate,” but the space also allowed the audience to experience the play’s full “spectacle.”

No less than Synge’s Playboy, Translations has “several sides” to it, as Friel himself recognized and identified in the “Sporadic Diary” that he kept while writing the play in 1979:

I don’t want to write a play about Irish peasants being suppressed by English sappers.

I don’t want to write a threnody on the death of the Irish language.

I don’t want to write a play about land surveying.

Indeed I don’t want to write a play about naming places.

And yet portions of all of these are relevant. Each is part of the atmosphere in which the real play lurks.

As crafted by Friel, the play never lands definitively on a single one of those topics or themes. Rather, as implied in the author’s program note to the first Field Day Theatre Company production of Translations in 1980—“The only merit in looking back is to understand how you are and where you are at this moment”—it engages with the complex and protean issue of “Irish identity” . . . though not in 1833, when the action of the play is set, but in 1980.

When first produced in Dublin in 1907 and then when first toured in America by the Abbey Theatre players in 1912, The Playboy of the Western World provoked protests both in the theatres and in the streets by audiences upset by what one reviewer described as “this unmitigated, protracted libel upon Irish men and, worse still, upon Irish girlhood.” More than a century later, audiences mostly wonder what the fuss was all about! Perhaps not quite so with Friel’s Translations: with all of the political, social, economic, and demographic changes in Ireland over the past thirty years, the coordinates of “Irish identity” may be different, but the issue is certainly no less relevant today than it was three decades ago.

BLOWING HIS OWN HORN

I like to believe that I rub shoulders mostly with pretty tolerant people. Hey, why can’t we all just get along? But I was a minor party to an incident last week that has left me wondering.

The incident started when I was meeting with a student in my office. Suddenly one of my colleagues appeared in the doorway, stepped over the threshold, blew a brief flourish on a shiny brass cornet, and then darted back to wherever he had come from. Was I at a loss for words? I sure was! And so was the student . . . but we both took the moment in stride—well, actually sitting down—and went on with our meeting . . .

A short while later, I heard my colleague practicing scales on his cornet behind his closed office door, which is only about 10 yards from my office. English Departments can foster all sorts of eccentricities among its faculty, but this musical “prelude and étude” (as it were) was a first in my 26 years of haunting those particular hallowed hallways. Whatever . . .

But apparently not “Whatever . . .” for some others in the vicinity! For, another short while later, my colleague paused in the midst of marching purposefully down the hallway and told me that our office manager had phoned him to say that there had been “a complaint” about his cornet-playing and to ask would he please cease and desist. Working himself up to a state of Swiftian saevo indignatio in my doorway, he continued on his way, calling back over his shoulder, “Well, I’m going to register a complaint with the office manager about whoever registered a complaint about me!”

Another extremely short while later, he stood in my doorway for the third time in about 20 minutes, this time with his proverbial tail between his legs. “It turns out,” he reported with downcast spirit, “that there were four complaints about my playing . . .”

Well, we had a good laugh about it all a few nights later, and he explained that he had brought his cornet to work because he had a thirteen-hour day on campus—a morning meeting and then nothing on the docket before an evening class—and figured he could get in some serious practice on his scales for his lesson the next day. Poor guy: I suspect that taking up the cornet doesn’t even rate on the chart of questionable midlife crisis activities, yet he gets chastised simply for blowing his horn. . . . I guess the real lesson learned from this incident is what we all know already about life in an English Department: “Everyone’s a critic . . .”

HOW DO YOU SPELL R-E-S-P-E-C-T?

This is a story I heard—second- or third-hand . . . but who’s counting?—about a guy that I have met once or twice just in passing. The guy is Irish-born (not that it really matters), and he’s a contractor of some sort. So . . . a couple of years ago he was at a garden center on Rte 28 just south of Boston and he noticed an African-American man that he thought he knew from somewhere, so he approached him and greeted him. “Where do I know you from?” he asked. “Have I done some work for you? Built an addition on your house . . . put in a driveway?” The African-American man smiled, then paused for a second before saying, modestly, “Well . . . I’m your Governor.” And so he was—the newly-elected-at-the-time Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick! He was at the garden center buying some flowers to plant at his home. Obviously, the contractor just couldn’t quite place him outside of the context in which he would have seen him before—that is, on the TV screen by which most of us know politicians, public officials and other “celebrities.”

I remembered that story a week or so ago when I saw Governor Patrick “out of context” myself—in a local supermarket. Unlike the contractor, I recognized him immediately; but also unlike the contractor, I did not approach him (though I do admire him greatly and plan to vote for him again in the next State election). But lots of other people in the supermarket did approach him, and I was impressed by how accommodating he was to requests that he pose for cellphone photographs with shoppers and their children. When I went through the checkout about fifteen minutes after he did, the clerks were still buzzing about how exciting it was to see him live-and-in-person and close-up: one of them said, “It was almost like meeting Obama . . .”

Anyway, as I tend to do whenever anything even vaguely out of the ordinary punctuates my day, I text-messaged my three daughters with the news: “Just saw the guv’nah @ Shaw’s!” Were they impressed? Well, here’s what I got back in response:

Woooo pretty cool! :)
Whattaya know! Did you talk to him?
wow!!! big friday night for deval patrick

Hmmm. . . . They say that text messaging is “tone deaf,” but somehow I came away with the impression that someone was being “disrespected” by those messages. Knowing that my daughters admire the Governor as much as I do, I have to figure that I was the one being denied just a little bit of R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

Not so, though, a few months ago when I texted those same three sardonic ladies from the airport in Albuquerque (of all places) where I had just seen another, though considerably lesser, local politician: talk about “out of context”! (But don’t talk about him as “considerably lesser”: his very large ego would be very badly bruised . . .) This was a guy whom, as a family, we had actively—and successfully—worked to defeat a couple of years ago in a hotly-contested election. So how did my daughters respond to the news that I had just seen him?

wow! did you say hi?
that sucks…safe travels!
Oh goshhhh….what is he doing there???

Well, that’s not quite all that was written . . . but rather than risk a libel suit, I’ll stop right there. And right here.