Theatre in Review: Ulster American (Irish Repertory Theatre) The main takeaway from Ulster American: Hell hath no fury like Geraldine Hughes scorned. As Ruth Davenport, a Belfast-born playwright at the mercy of a narcissistic, boneheaded Hollywood star and a craven British director, she stands in for writers everywhere, showered with praise from colleagues who want to alter every word of their work. Staring down a tidal wave of nonsense, she applies a magnificent slow burn. Provoked by deceit, she wields a tongue like a dagger. Grabbing hold of a nearby Academy Award statuette, she makes her feelings known in no uncertain terms. Pity the stagehands who have to clean up the blood. To be sure, Ruth's sharp elbows are on display from the get-go. On her way to London to meet Jay Conway, the American star of her new play, she has quarreled violently with her mother, ending in a car crash. Barely missing a beat, she deposited the old lady in the nearest ER before hopping on the next available plane. Ruth is remarkably unworried: "She's a tough woman," she adds, dismissing thoughts of possible medical complications to gush over Jay, who is already hinting that Broadway is in everyone's future. (To be sure, Ruth's callous approach to elder care is well-founded; speaking about Ruth's friend, Gemma, killed by a Provisional IRA bombing, she says, "She was awful dreary. That whole family was dreary. Her being murdered was the most interesting thing about them." The apple doesn't fall...) If Ulster American had Ruth's presence, humor, and ferocity, it would be one of the season's notable productions. But playwright David Lawrence wields a sledgehammer, not a stiletto. His characters are so clueless that there's little sport in watching them have at each other. For example, an early bit in which Leigh, the director, mistakes James Baldwin for one of Alec Baldwin's band of acting brothers, produces a shock laugh, but give it a second thought, and you'll sense its falsity. It sets the tone for the evening: Jay, polishing his feminist credentials, thinks Alison Bechdel is a man. Ruth gushes over a film Jay made with Jack Lemmon, whom, she is stunned to learn, is dead. Yes, Ruth, since 2001. Spoofing vacuous film stars is a playwright's basic skill, like punctuation and grammar, but Lawrence badly overdoes it. Jay rattles on self-servingly about his membership in AA, demonstrates the worst Irish accent ever, and nags Ruth and Leigh to let him wear an eyepatch on stage. ("I think it would be a great metaphor for my character's moral decay.") As a capper, having signed onto a play about Northern Ireland, he asks Ruth, "What is Ulster?" He also indulges in an airheaded discussion about the propriety of the N-word, makes a remarkably vulgar and unfunny comment about Liza Minnelli, and, drawing on one of his early films, forces Leigh into a repellent thought experiment involving Rutger Hauer, nuclear blackmail, and rape fantasies involving Princess Diana and Margaret Thatcher. If all this seems offensive, we've been here before. It's remarkable how many bits of Ulster American are recycled from Cyprus Avenue, also by Lawrence, seen at the Public Theater in 2018: These include debates Northern identity (British, not Irish, thank you), the provocative use of racial epithets, jokes about Riverdance-style entertainments, and a violent, bloody climax. Clearly, the playwright has all his hobby horses in a row. Ulster American isn't as coarse as Cyprus Avenue, but it's not for lack of trying. The production nevertheless yields some pretty good laughs, thanks to Ciaran O'Reilly's staging. He certainly has a game cast: Matthew Broderick's patented deadpan delivery works fairly well for Jay, although the character is so ignorant (and, based on the few line readings we get from Ruth's play, untalented) that his stardom is impossible to credit. Lawrence is not a stickler for consistency: Jay doesn't know the first thing about Irish history and has seriously misapprehended Ruth's script, yet he is thoroughly up to date on the Turkish art film director Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Broderick doesn't try to navigate these contradictions, which is probably sensible. He even does his best with lines like this: "My first manager was a woman. A black woman! Of color!" His co-stars fare much better: As Leigh, a specialist in playing one side against the other, Max Baker is a master of virtue-signaling for fun and profit. (He views this production as his ticket to running the National Theatre.) In one of Lawrence's best twists, Leigh is staggered to learn that Ruth votes Conservative. "I don't like the European Union. I don't see how that has any bearing on our friendship," she says, revealing how little she knows him. (Then again, since Leigh and Ruth have collaborated on numerous plays about Northern Ireland politics, how come her views have never been discussed?) As mentioned, Hughes is a wonder, slipping from hero worship to homicidal rage by degrees, finally delivering the ultimate playwright's revenge on her treacherous creative team. Not for nothing is the name "Quentin Tarantino" repeatedly invoked. The production is burnished by a fine production design, especially Charlie Corcoran's comfortably appointed living room set, featuring plenty of theatrical posters and a mannequin dressed in a period costume. Orla Long's costumes are solid character studies, especially Jay's studiedly casual, obviously expensive jacket. Michael Gottlieb's lighting and the sound design of Ryan Rumery and Florian Staab are typically first-rate. Interestingly, a play about political identity never finds a profile of its own, stumbling as both a satirical show-business power struggle and as a mordant comment on the intersection of art and politics. (A late-in-the-show device, featuring blackmail with a potentially toxic, career-destroying tweet, is all too typical of the play's over-the-top methodology.) But if you get fed up with Ulster American's vulgarities and inconsistencies, keep an eye fixed on Hughes' Ruth; she knows just how you feel and is ready to do something about it. --David Barbour 
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