Synge's Wake

By T.E. Kalem

Manhattan's Lincoln Center Repertory Theater is where dramatic classics are reduced to instant ruins. Plays that have weathered the test of time crumble before this company's demolition crews of sub-par actors, inept directors and mindless miscasting. Even under this grievous assault, the greatest plays invariably salvage something of themselves. Lesser and somewhat fragile dramas, like The Playboy of the Western World, are bulldozed into poetic rubble.

This is John Millington Synge's centennial. That fact apparently inspired the current revival of Playboy, if revival it may be called, since it more nearly resembles a wake. The play is both simple and symbolic. Young Christy Mahon (David Birney) wanders into a drowsy County Mayo pub with the electrifying news that he has murdered his father by splitting his skull. This stimulates the imagination of the villagers, who are starved for heroics, and captures the heart of Pegeen Mike (Martha Henry), the pubkeeper's daughter, who longs for a man among mites. Bloody-pated but noisomely alive, the father appears--and the intoxicating dream succumbs to the hangover-ache of reality.

The play has a misty beauty that can only be realized by honoring the lovingly precise cadences of Irish speech, the mood music, humor, and melancholy of the Irish spirit. All of these are lost or squandered in the Lincoln Center production. There is a winningly vulnerable boyishness in David Birney's playboy, but the Pegeen Mike of Martha Henry keeps such a gimlet eye on the bar and such a steely tone in her voice that one never believes that she could sway to the lyre of romance.

T.E. Kalem

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.