Theatre in Review: The Pride of Parnell Street (59E59)

	Photo credit: Patrick Redmond

A marriage is shattered and a way of life unravels in The Pride of Parnell Street -- but don't expect melodramatics from Sebastian Barry's quietly powerful two-hander. It could easily have devolved into soap opera but, in the author's hands, this tale of violence and crushing loss is presented in words that are as plain and hard as stones.

On stage -- together, yet apart -- are Janet and Joe, once married, now all but strangers for nearly a decade. As working-class Dubliners born in the '70s, they are intimately acquainted with pain and struggle. Joe supports Janet and their three children with his work as "a midday man" -- trolling the streets for unlocked cars he can loot, pawning the goods for ready cash. Tragedy is such a frequent visitor that mourning hardly seems worth the time. The death of a small child, his broken body dragged down the street by a beer truck, is presented in such matter-of-fact fashion that it's a minute or two before the impact of it is fully felt. The same is true of Janet's recollection of an IRA bombing, here distilled down to the single appalling image of a mutilated body lying in a devastated street.

In spite of it all, Janet and Joe seem destined to persevere until the night when Joe, maddened by drink and enraged by Ireland's humiliation in a World Cup final, lashes out at Janet, beating her black and blue. The incident tears them apart forever, sending them in wildly different directions; she struggles to build a respectable life for herself and her sons, while he spirals down in a haze of heroin, ending up in a charity ward, his body covered with AIDS lesions.

Speaking directly to the audience, Janet and Joe tell their stories in counterpoint, in language that is tart, skeptical, bristling with unexpressed pain. Offering her idea of nostalgia, Janet describes the streets of her youth: "Jesus, it was like f---ing Hollywood, North Great George's Street, that time, but without the palm trees." She recalls, with amusement and pride, a moment when, asleep ("I was so tired I coulda slept through Hiroshima"), Joe attended to an ailing baby with comically disastrous results. Such moments are small epiphanies in a darker landscape marked by deprivation and heartache. "We didn't have much a life maybe but it was a Dublin life, and every Dublin life is life worth living," Janet sadly notes.

Joe's version is heavier on the gritty, horrifying details of their lives together and apart, including the stabbing of Janet's father, and an attempted robbery in a park that ends in bloodshed. He offers a blunt and amusing portrait of the local dock workers. ("They'd knock the bejazus out of each other and then the next thing, they'd be in one of the pubs there singing sentimental songs together, with the blood and bruises all over them.") And he spares us none of the details of his membership in "the scag-artists union," as his life becomes nothing but a series of pauses between needle pricks. Providing a kind of sub-theme to these personal accounts is the story of Dublin itself, which changes in ways that Joe and Janet can barely imagine. Their world, a gritty, poverty-ridden town dominated by a single culture, becomes an international city, teeming with money and immigrants of various races.

If The Pride of Parnell Street pulses with some of Barry's finest writing, it also casts a harsh spotlight on his weakness as a dramatist. A novelist of note, he often constructs his plays out of monologues, a strategy that inevitably leaves one impatient for action, conflict, anything like drama. The dueling points of view do provide a certain implied tension, and there are certain passages -- especially Joe's attempt at winning back Janet's attention by quietly placing a gravestone on their child's grave -- that are particularly affecting. But narration isn't drama, and, too often, the play bogs down in lengthy stretches of prose. There's no getting away from the fact that the last half hour, with its unrelieved parade of agonies, is a bit of a trial.

This would be a more significant problem if The Pride of Parnell Street wasn't powered by two riveting performances. As Janet, Mary Murray proves to be a quick-change artist of the soul, executing a series of transformations that reveal with devastating precision how the years, and their collateral damage, have had their way with her. Recalling a happy family moment, she glows with an incandescent interior light; a second later, she seems old, haggard, thoroughly used up. When violence strikes, she doesn't raise her voice, but her body trembles from the struggle to maintain her composure. Curled up on a magnificently scrofulous mattress, ravaged by illness, Aidan Kelly's Joe recalls his life as a landslide of sins and misfortunes with blackly comic detachment, his demeanor occasionally shattered by stabs of pain that leave him doubled up. Clearly, the director, Jim Culleton, is a marvel with actors; both Murray and Kelly treat the material with a welcome understatement that only adds to its power.

The rest of the production is equally unadorned, yet thoughtfully worked out. Sabine Dargent's simple setting nevertheless abounds with telling details -- the way Joe's bed in sunk into the deck, the small window that reveals an active rainstorm and, later, a night sky -- that provide just the right atmosphere; her costumes are well-chosen, too. Mark Galione's lighting design sensitively captures each shift of mood.

At the point where The Pride of Parnell Street threatens to fatally overstay its welcome, the feeling of stasis is transformed by a moment of grace that briefly brings Joe and Janet together again. It's not a happy ending by any means, but there is healing of a sort in it. Then again, there may be more than we know -- for, in Barry's view, love is a deeply mysterious thing. As Janet says, "See love between a man and a woman, it's -- private. It happens where you never do see it. In rooms."