
Stage cap from Sebastian Barry's 'White Woman Street' at the Irish Repetory Theatre
by Sam Juliano
Irish playwright Sebastian Barry has a gift for language. But in his “western” White Woman Street, which is presently winding down it’s run at the Irish Repetory Theatre, this propensity makes for a bizarre marriage of poetry and monologues. The result is an overload of talk, with incoherent sentences and long passages that are ill-fitted to the stage. Granted, the production’s director Charlotte Moore is more concerned with impressionistic notions, and a meditation on myths and memories, than any kind of historical documentation, and in that sense the show hits it’s mark, even in the narratively lugubrious first half. But this is basically what Barry’s theatre is all about, and his detractors have long maintained that his poetic style is ill-suited to the theatrical form. Theatre goers with a taste beyond standard dialogue, however, are in for a treat.
Had Barry been truly interested in a revisionist western, he might have opted to set White Woman Street in a period and place more archetypal than 1916 Ohio, especially with the employment of dialogue that addresses issues like Indian oppression and cultural displacement. Coincidentally, the rock musical, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, written by Alex Timbers and Michael Friedman, still running at the Public Theatre, deals with the same issues, and even with distinct satirical underpinnings, there’s a stronger resonance. Barry’s intent is clearly symbolic, as it’s clear enough that his early 20th Century Buckeye state setting is meant to mirror the Easter Uprising in Ireland, and aging Trooper O’Hara’s dream of returning home. In fact, by shifting his focus to America, Barry employs symbols that establish the same type of need to reconnect with the past and establish domestic stability. But it’s difficult to negotiate the disjointed progression, story incoherence, and loquatiousness of the characters. And the thick Irish brogues don’t quite match up with the actors, recalling Puccini’s opera La Fanciulla del West, where cowboys spoke in Italian. (more…)
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