going home to milk the cows
by
Douglas Messerli
Pat
Kinevane (writer and performer), Denis Clohessy (composer) Before /
produced by Fishamble and Odyssey Theatre Ensemble by Beth Hogan / the
performance I saw was on Sunday, November 17, 2019.
The
noted Irish actor/author Pat Kinevane, who has presented, through his
association with Jim Culleton’s Fishamble Company in Ireland, numerous solo
performances, including Forgotten, Silent, and Underneath,
in his new show, Before, is interested in exploring issues that have
been mostly comically treated in such movies as Kramer vs. Kramer and Mrs.
Doubtfire (the latter of which, somewhat ironically, given the contexts of
this performance, will soon open as a Broadway musical); but while the totally
imaginary world of musical theater is put to work in Before—musical
songs composed by Denis Clohessy, with highly clever lyrics by the
actor—Kinevane’s central character, Pontius Ross is far more serious about how
his daughter conceived in an intense one-night stand with a woman named
Felicity, was literally taken away from him in a far from felicitous encounter.
Paying alimony, even though his one-night
lover has given no real evidence that her daughter is his, the country rube
Pontius grows to love the child for the first 4 years he is given visiting
rights to see her. Yet one night, returning to the rather wealthy home in which
Felicity resides to reclaim a coat he has left behind after his short visit to
see his daughter, he finds his former sexual partner having another intensive
sex interlude with a ponytailed man, who turns out to be her cousin—perhaps the
real father of the child.
Going ballistic after the discovery of
her incestuous relationship, Felicity does damage to her own face, blaming Pontius,
whom the police arrest and is soon after denied all access to the child he had
grown to love.
Is it any wonder that the young boy who
has grown up in a family devoted to local theater productions—his not-so-handsome
father singing, in a strong voice, behind a screen, and his theater-devoted
mother, who designs hundreds of costumes for these productions, sewing up
dozens of kimonos for a production of The Mikado—declares he hates
musicals, which all end in redemptive happiness.
Yet, we easily perceive, Pontius has been
raised under their umbrella, and the actor enters the stage with a “Singing in
the Rain”-like protection and quickly gives it up, along with his leather coat,
to sing (not as spectacularly evidently as his father) and dances (perhaps not
as brilliantly as his hidden hero, Gene Kelly), but with great aplomb. Kinevane
convinces us that we might all be stars in the musical genre, dancing and
singing our way through somewhat lonely and ordinary lives.
This actor turns his Cork county rube into
a rather sophisticated human being, while reminding us that in Ireland local
theater is as beloved as the great Dublin theaters such as the Abbey, where Kinevane
originally performed, and the Gate. Kinevane has a powerful, rather charming voice,
performing such lyrics where he rhymes, amazingly, words such as “miserable”
with “advisable” (credit this fact to the Edinburgh Fringe Review by
Rosemary Waugh), and numerous other lyrics that Cole Porter might have
delighted in. The songs alone might be a reason to attend this great solo-work.
But then there is the amazing dancing (choreography by Emma O’Kane). Kinevance
can spin on a dime, play-out scenes from both Kelly’s and Fred Astaire’s
amazing dance performances, and, finally, put on white tap-shoes to test the
best of them. If he’s a little sluggish, well that’s what this everyday lover,
who has lost his heart, is all about.
Apparently, Pontius has not only lost his
innocence, his love (in the form of his lover), but his sexual libido in the
sexual assault Felicity has made upon him. It appears he never has never had sex
again. “One orgasm was enough to last me for my lifetime.”
As Kinevane noted in an interview, given
the new demands of contemporary Irish culture, there are a great many lonely
farmers left in the lurch by Ireland’s increasingly commercial success.
There is a slight danger that he is
arguing here for the patriarchy or even for a kind populist notion of what
Irish life should be. Yet, given his hidden love of all thing’s theater, his
deep love of his illegitimate daughter, we easily dismiss his sins. He is,
after all, performing this all in the great Dublin department store Cleary’s on
the very last day of its existence, a store his mother evidently thought might
contain everything you ever needed, as the constant interruptive store
announcements proclaim, becoming increasingly, as the play proceeds, more and
more personal, until the public announcements tell him what he should purchase.
His daughter has invited a possible
meeting after 17 years and he has come up to Dublin with the mixed feelings of
a possible reconciliation and, frankly, a psychological reintegration of his
years of loss and desire.
The white dress he buys for his
long-lost daughter is stunningly beautiful (costume designer Catherine
Condell) as it literally shivers from a hanger on the stage. It is almost as if his
daughter has already entered the dress and become the beauty he has lost after
all these years. She is on her way to a new life in the US.
Kinevane’s ending is purposely ambiguous,
and readings by audiences will be radically different. The actor/author seems
to suggest that he waited and waited, realizing that she would never show up.
His later reference to an almost transcendent sense of release in a flight over
Lockerbie, Scotland suggests, perhaps that he might have himself died on the
infamous Pan Am flight 103, which killed in air and on ground 207 people.
Yet there is utterly no reason why the
Irish farmer, returning to milk his cows, would have been on that flight. It
was apparently his beloved daughter, on her way to a new life, who has died in
the Lockerbie disaster, the plane on its way from Frankfurt and London to New
York and Detroit. All that had been previously taken away from this good Irish
outlander was taken away yet again. If he must declare that he “hates
musicals”—as much as I personally love them—we can totally empathize with his
feelings. He may have to sing and dance his days alone for the rest of his
life.
Los
Angeles, November 18, 2019
Reprinted
from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (November 2019).
No comments:
Post a Comment