Villanova's Irish Festival

Irish spring

ROBERT ZALLER

Villanova University has climaxed the residency of the distinguished Irish playwright, novelist and poet Sebastian Barry with a week built around his work, but also featuring the poet Paul Muldoon and the playwright Conor McPherson. It has been a good reminder, in this month that has marked the centenary of Samuel Beckett, that contemporary Irish literature is alive and well.

Each night of the week presented a different program, but the centerpiece was the premiere production of Barry’s two-character, one-act play, Fred and Jane. On the night I attended, it was paired with Conor McPherson’s long monologue, The Good Thief.
Fred and Jane is recent Barry (2002), but also vintage. The setting and plot is simplicity itself: two nuns, Sister Beatrice (Joanna Rotte) and Sister Anna (Marcie Thurstlic), who, sitting side by side in a Dublin convent, recount their live— that is, their relationship to each other. Beatrice is a woman of 60, dour but of a dry wit; Anna, lively and 30ish. Barry lets their story unfold in alternating monologues and occasional exchanges, much like an old married couple so wedded to each other that sparse communication conveys everything needful. Of course, they are not a married couple: but, nonetheless, truly wedded.

Of nuns and human hearts

There is no suggestion of anything but an intellectual and spiritual relationship between them, but as their story unfolds it becomes clear that they exist for and in each other, and when, for reasons never made clear, their order separates them by sending Anna to spread the word in godless Manchester, Anna suffers and Beatrice declines alarmingly. Since neither will defy her superiors or either admit any third party into their relationship— one that would have to seem suspect to anyone not privy to the special nature of their bond—there seems no solution until the Mother Superior of the convent, finally grasping the source of Beatrice’s distress, arranges for Anna’s return. “Who knows what a nun is?” she is said to muse, meaning, who knows what the human heart is?

Happily reunited, the two women (who are in fact never apart from each other physically on stage in Harriet Power’s spare but effective direction) resume their intimacy, and the play ends in that quiet glow. Rotte and Thurstlic are both quite fine, with Rotte bringing an understated humor to Beatrice that fends off any hint of sentimentality, and Thurstlic high spirits and candor to Anna. It is over in 35 minutes— a wisp of a piece, you might say— but it seems a lifetime of experience, such as only theater can give in the hands of a master. (The Fred and Jane of the title, incidentally, are Fred Astaire and the Jane Fonda of Klute, respectively the characters chosen by Beatrice and Anna as their patron saints— for who else but movie stars can we pattern ourselves on, even in a convent?)

Two long by twice

The Good Thief, at twice the length of Fred and Jane, is also twice the length it needs be. Its solitary, unnamed protagonist (Steven Patrick Smith) is a small-time enforcer whose boss, having stolen his girl, sends him into what may well be a trap, which he finds himself obliged to fight his way out of with the wife and small daughter of the man he has killed. The story meanders on a good while in shaggy dog fashion, with no good coming either to our hero or those he encounters.

The point though is made early on that, appalling as he is, McPherson’s Everyman suffers too, and so is a candidate for redemption. Once we have taken it, there is not much point to piling on the Grand Guignol. McPherson can write, so we are willing to follow him a little further than we should, and Steven Patrick Smith’s performance is a tour de force. But less would have been more, and while repentance may become the sinner, it is, dramatically at least, fatal for the thief.