Urn of Memory

By T.E. Kalem

DA by Hugh Leonard

Irish writers are silkworms in spinning words. They have an abiding sense of the past and have never really lost the oral tradition that makes them grand tellers of tales. The psychology of their land is that of loss, but the loss is borne with salty wit and exuberantly wild fantasy.

Fuse these qualities at their apex and you get an O'Casey. Even a lesser Irish dramatist like Hugh Leonard can be uncommonly rewarding. Da, now at Manhattan's Hudson. Guild Theater, means dad. The play is a fencing match with the ghosts of the past. The blood drawn is palpably human, the wit, parried and thrust, strikes sparks of continuous and sometimes quite unexpected humor. Says the father in Da of his late wife: "She died an Irishwoman's death--drinking tea." The laughs crop up like that, not as explosions but implosions, deeply rooted in character and race.

The hero of Da is Charlie Now (Brian Murray), a middle-aged writer who has come back to his boyhood home near Dublin to bury his father and dispose of the old man's effects. As he begins stuffing faded letters and papers into the kitchen stove, who should shuffle in and plop into his favorite armchair but old Da himself (Barnard Hughes)? Only to be followed by Young Charlie (Richard Seer), Charlie's teen-age self; Mother (Sylvia O'Brien); and Drumm (Lester Rawlins), a dour early employer given to pungent maxims: "Marriage is the maximum loneliness with the minimum of privacy." The play proceeds by anecdotes and episodes, some funny, some sad, all telling. Leonard makes the pas sage of time itself a major character in Da. What time does for Charlie is to make him realize that what he yearns to do--exorcise the past--is not only impossible but self-defeating. He is bonded to what he wishes to sunder. Like all of humankind, he belongs to the great chain of being, and his father is his closest accessible, unalterable link in that chain.

To reject his father, even in memory, is to deny himself.

Medals should be struck for all mem bers of the cast. As Da, Hughes is an expansive field marshal of lifelong defeat who acts with the authority of an uncaged lion. The ensemble surrounding him reminds one again that the richest single treasure of the U.S. stage may be its actors.

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