'Tir Na Nog'
A Magic Theater presentation of a play in two acts by Edna O'Brien, based on her novel "The Country Girls." Directed by Chris Smith.
With: Deborah Black, Anne Darragh, Matt Foyer, Robert Parsons, Mary Pitchford, Summer Serafin, Cat Thompson, Michael Louis Wells, Allison Jean White.
Nearly 50 years after it launched her literary career, Edna O'Brien has adapted "The Country Girls" for the stage as "Tir Na Nog" (Land of Youth). Once considered a shocking affront to her native Ireland, the novel has long since mellowed into an impish charm that on the whole survives intact in this uneven but largely satisfying new incarnation. Magic Theater a.d. Chris Smith's strong premiere production smoothes over some textual choppiness, but the play, nonetheless, seems destined for further exposure on both sides of the Atlantic.
In 1960, the book's portrait of young women drinking, smoking, disrespecting clergy and consorting with married men was enough to get it publicly burnt in Irish churchyards and widely denounced. As O'Brien's work (including two "Girls" sequels) only grew more sexually frank, her novels were banned entirely from Eire even into the late 1970s, though they generated relatively little controversy elsewhere.
Her heroines are two teenagers from a hamlet in 1950s County Clare. Studious poetry lover and aspiring writer Kate (Allison Jean White) is inconsolable when her beloved mother dies in an accident. It won't do for her to stay with her drunken, shiftless pa, so she's taken in by the well-to-do parents of schoolmate Baba (Summer Serafin).
Latter is a flame-haired little hellion who can't wait to misbehave in the gold-digging adult leagues. When the two are sent off to convent school, Baba ensures they're both eventually expelled.
Disgraced, the girls go to big-city Dublin, where Baba hones her vamping skills while Kate pines for a dashing older gentleman (Robert Parsons), who can't bring himself to leave an unstable wife.
Most of the nine-member cast play multiple roles. A couple too-broadly-sketched minor parts aside, they manage beautifully, with particularly fine work from Anne Darragh and Michael Louis Wells as some of the more sympathetic figures Kate encounters.
While the book doesn't seem wildly crammed with incident, O'Brien strains to encompass its events in the first half of the play, which too often lunges through overly abbreviated scenes connected by music sung and played by the cast.
An earlier title was "A Play With Song," and, with everything from traditional airs to Christmas carols and Hit Parade tunes often gratuitously plugged in, the text initially feels suspended somewhere between screenplay and almost-musical.
Still, there's much to enjoy, particularly as the second half settles into a less hectic rhythm of meatier scenes. The presence throughout of a Greek-chorus-like Singing Woman (Deborah Black) is a pretentious device that might wisely be dropped, and the narrative simply peters out on a vague note of mixed nostalgia and gotta-move-on maturity, despite a nice final ensemble step-dance by former "Riverdance" co-choreographer Jean Butler.
But these are fixable flaws, more than compensated for by the show's richness in character, humor, pathos and vivid cultural backgrounding.
A bit of a passive blank in the book, Kate is given real definition by White, while Serafin is terrific as the intrinsically ants-in-pants-y Baba, a character who might easily have become a one-dimensional brat. Design contribs are kept simple but sharp. Dialect coach Lynne Soffer deserves particular credit for the cast's mostly creditable brogues.
Set, Annie Smart; costumes, Cassandra Carpenter; lighting, Kurt Landisman; sound, Sara Huddleston; choreography/associate director, Jean Butler; music adviser, Aine Ui Cheallaigh; musical director, Mary Pitchford; dialect coach, Lynne Soffer; production stage manager, Angela Nostrand. Opened March 1, 2008. Reviewed March 6. Running time: 2 HOURS.
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Date in print: Mon., Mar. 17, 2008