Enda Walsh's "Bedbound,' by Inis Nua Theatre

Over the past 20 years, Ireland has triumphantly emerged from its legacy as a "priest-ridden, second-rate, potato-peopled country" into the top tiers of the European economy. In stark contrast to this material success, Irish playwrights have voiced a far more pessimistic view of the country's nascent wealth and successful integration into the world economy.

This past year alone, the Irish-oriented Inis Nua Theatre Company has staged two plays addressing this discontent; and last fall, Curio Theatre's production of Conor McPherson's The Weir contributed another complaint against the rapid changes that have tarnished the Emerald Isle's cherished glow. Inis Nua's current production of Enda Walsh's Bedbound adds one more voice to the chorus.

In Bedbound, Dad (Brian McCann) wakes up wearing a stained suit while lying next to his Daughter (Melissa Lynch). Paralyzed from the waist down and literally stuck to the soiled sheets, she demands that he fill the empty space with words, either by entertaining her with reminiscences, or by reading to her from the tattered pages of a pored-over romance novel.

When Dad obliges, dreams of economic valor as a furniture magnate in Dublin as well as his rants about killing his boss or boot-stomping the competition mirror the fairy tale of Daughter's book. Lynch gilds his anecdotes with impersonations of Dad's tormented underlings (he kills them too). In the course of 70 minutes, their symbiotic paralysis becomes a metaphor for the miserables shipwrecked on the shores of the global economy.

Paralysis can be riveting

As filmmaker Julian Schnabel proved in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Tom Reing's strong direction and this cast demonstrate that paralysis can be riveting. Bedbound plays like a more concentrated, cruel, humorous— and distinctively Irish— version of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, where a father's shame at failure destroys his family's future. Bedbound balances its depravity and callous view of humanity with sharp wit. (Not even Oliver packs the poorhouse with so much intrigue.)

Although Lynch does little more than lie in bed, her face shifts constantly, like a storm-swept sand dune through dozens of expressions. Her eyes burst with light in a gentle moment— drawing pity, yes, but also a wretched humor when grinning through a mouthful of rotted teeth that her (now dead) mom used to "call her princess."

After spending the entire past theater season playing prone parts— crippled in Happy Days, bound and gagged in Gagarin Way— McCann puts on a spellbinding display of thespic virtuosity as a jig-dancing, funny and more aggressive Willy Loman. McCann shows us a tea kettle of a man on emotional boil, ready to either explode or evaporate into vapor. Whatever sympathy Lynch draws, McCann sucks into his vortex of self-absorption; whatever tenderness she evokes, he mangles into self-loathing. Between them, their performances pack a pair of lifetime into this too-short one-act play.

Entombed in poverty

Costume designer Maggie Baker drapes both characters in ragged clothes that even homeless people would reject, and Lisi Stoessel's set design literally entombs them in poverty.

But is economic poverty really still the root of Ireland's problems, or ours? To be sure, like the rest of the world, Ireland's economy has recently tanked. But Walsh wrote this play in 2000, at the pinnacle of the "Celtic Tiger" economic miracle. Similarly, Arthur Miller wrote his depressing Death of a Salesman during the rise of the post-World War II middle class. Does either of them really think, like Bedbound's Daughter, that "I was happy in the shit and should have stayed there?"

Eighty years ago, Walsh's compatriot George Bernard Shaw could famously quip that he "hates the poor" while hoping (falsely) for an economic system that would civilize those wretches (in truth, Shaw really hoped the poor would just die off). Well, Shaw's "dream economy" has arrived in his native land. We can only wonder why so many modern Irish playwrights persist in sounding like the Luddites of the literary class.