Marie Mullen, the acclaimed actor, seems to be run off her toes. Calling out instructions, she quickly ascends a three-story wood staircase behind Druid’s’ practice session space, which would be a dizzy sight for a traveler even though the steps didn’t’ stop mid-air, leaving a sheer drop to the ground underneath. A robust piece of the set that is important, each structurally and thematically, to the brand new play Epiphany, the steps are wherein Mullen’s person Morkan welcomes her guests in a flurry of goodwill and standard agitation, as each arrives from the floor beneath.
Still clutching her script, Mullen reaches out with her unfastened hand, some 20 toes above the ground, to ease the fringe of the theatre curtain striking at her back while her director Garry Hynes reminds her no longer to drop her strains. In these situations, those appear like the most certain matters to fall. Similarly, dauntless on the ground degree a couple of minutes later, Mullen makes brief, specific pointers for what’s proving to be a dynamic bodily performance when Aaron Monaghan enters the scene as an unabashedly alcoholic person named Freddy in a faintly comical hat (“Anything to upstage the others,” Hynes teases), Mullen wonders if she may fill his hip-flask in one fluid motion as though in flight.
Observing from the back of his computer, a tall, narrow figure responds skeptically. “I simply don’t see a global in which that is possible,” replies the playwright Brian Watkins. If the arena that his new play constructs for Druid already appears mistily familiar, it’s miles partially as it has been stimulated by way of James Joyce’s novella The Dead (even though not adapted from it), and in part, as it owes something of its fashion, as bodily as it’s far cerebral, to a body of work already associated with the organization. You can recognize his scrutiny. For all of the comedian brio of this beginning scene, wherein a motley organization gathers in a crumbling Georgian home in Dublin for a party, it appears critical no longer to miss any steps.
When rehearsals smash, Watkins explains the genesis of his play from the floor up. A personable, erudite creator, born in Colorado and now based totally in Brooklyn, has an academic fondness for quotation, citing Simone Weil and Marilyn Robinson. Refreshingly, his play doesn’t’ endure a hint of postmodern pastiche. Visiting Ireland simultaneously as Druid paintings-shopped his previous drama, Wyoming, Watkins began analyzing Dubliners. Two testimonies from Joyce’s series struck him in particular: Grace (which starts with a drunken cave in a staircase) and The Dead, wherein Gabriel, our fretting highbrow, experiences a humbling realization during the Feast of the Epiphany at the home of his aunts, the Morkan sisters.
Eureka
The staircase, Watkins says, turned into his very own eureka, “the initial photograph which guided the complete introduction of the component. The play exists in this liminal space, among imminence and transcendence, among up and down. It very a great deal approximately the country of being in between things.” In other words, this familiar, undying setting, imagined by an American traveling to Ireland, is a space that is neither pretty right here nor there.
In a fulfilling way, the play treats The Dead much less as its supply than its scaffold. It holds to a comparable structure, following the route of a night’s festivities, keeping some characters in new variations (Mullen’s neurotic Kate Morkan, keen to restore a subculture without complete expertise it; Monagwithoutenefullt inebriated Freddy, now an academic), remodeling others (Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, is now Julia McDermott’s’ woke millennial known as Loren) and introducing others: a musician, an attorney, a psychiatrist.
In a play that seems freighted with absences, the visitor of honor, Gabriel, in no way arrives, but as an alternative, sends his speech, its phrases blurred by using snowfall, with an enigmatic emissary. Through the window, that snow is still falling in wellknown and faintly through the universe, while the characters, reluctantly parting with their smartphones to fumble through forgotten rituals and conversations that both loosen and deepen with wine, appear to be in a comparable function. “They are trying to find what it means in a world that seems remarkably topsy-turvy,” Watkins agrees, “and that’s truly a feeling I have on this cutting-edge second.” At its heart, he says, is a much simpler query. Why do humans accumulate?
That’s a pertinent query for the theatre itself, a historical art form, impermanent and enduring, that can appear to be a fascinating anachronism in a separating age of Netflix and Amazon Prime. (Watkins is currently growing a display for the latter streaming provider.) Although educated as an actor, Watkins found less chafing and greater pleasure in writing, something “I should do by myself “daily. There is not nothing like seeing something come to life on the stage. That sense of impermanence you mention is immediately torturous and exquisite. Nothing else roots you so aesthetically to the moment. And the magic of that usually added me again to the theatre.”
While studying playwriting in New York’s renowned Julliard School, Watkins determined Druid, regular site visitors to the town, whose tours brought an ever-ascending staircase of Irish playwriting: the grimly comic grotesquerie of Martin McDonagh, the painstakingly ludic stories of Enda Walsh, the scuffed spirituality of Tom Murphy, the acidic depths of Samuel Beckett. Watkins felt a sort of kinship. “I ddon’t suppose I could be an author, but it has been no longer for Irish writers,” he says.
If Druid had discovered echoes of such works in Watkins’s writing, in its witty and cerebral folds, he would have found a particular reverence for writing in Druid. Hynes, directing her first new play for the business enterprise, seeing that 2015 (Tom Murphy’s Brigid) and 2007 before that (Lucy Caldwell’s Leaves), is unerringly aware of dashes within the text, as even though the comedy and emotion of the play will only work if they nail the underlying mechanics. In that regard, Watkins’s textual content can seem restrictive at the start, stumbled upon, regularly written in precisely measured, overlapping conversations. “I feel what it seems like,” he tells me. I’ve usually been interested in how rhythm affects meaning.”
Permissive
In another manner, Epiphany is remarkably permissive. Chiming with Druid’s’ evolving rules – and a current groundswell in Irish theatre towards pluralism – his characters are written to be executed bsing actors of any gender or ethnicity. Like the collaboration – or, indeed, the current-day Dublin the play depicts, the nine-man or woman ensemble is a broadly global mix, providing Irish, British, and American performers. It makes for an active birthday celebration.
“If Joyce changed into writing Dubliners towards a deeply nationalistic context, I wanted to write down something that becomes deeply within a globalist context,” Watkins reasons. Not placing strict brackets around characters additionally meant, “we wouldn’t be making use of stereotypes to everyone: all and sundry become on an equal footing as away as what makes us human.”
That raises an exciting question: can characterization happen without particular context? The casting here (“an extended, hard technique””) subtly affects its meaning, where an interracial male couple (performed with the aid of Jude Akiwudike and Marty Rea) indicates a selected cultural context without ever spelling out their records, or Aran, an individual performed with the assistance of African-American display screen celebrity Grace Byers, now considerably takes Gabriel’s crucial position at the celebration (and, for an accurate degree, his galoshes.)
“We played with all of those dynamics of the race of gender to peer what the right mix felt like,” says Watkins, including that it partially made up for the pressure of his method to rhythm and structure. He smiles. “Which, in overall performance, I desire feels a chunk like a cozy straitjacket.”
To look at the staircase again was to find an almost analogous symbol, a non-negotiable structure considering a whir of unfastened movement. Epiphany does something comparable, inviting its characters through rituals, whether meals or birthday celebration pieces while considering exchanges about the past, the future, and the meaning of it all.
Watkins is sluggish to side with any individual’s factor of view but retreats from restrictive thinking: “Philosophical determinism is to be deeply unsatisfying for a revel in of life that seems so wealthy with serious complications and non-binary things. It’s’ now, not simply black and white. Its’ form of gray, or instead, this luminosity of it, defines all of existence. I’ve usually been some distance more interested in questions than solutions.”
Another compelling image in Epiphany is shadows (“What a profound aspect they’re,” one character comments, “conceptually, literally, psychologically . . .””).Indeed, shadows here ensure absences experience greater conspicuousness while leaving a lingering hint of preceding generations and all their lost epiphanies.
Watkins can also have an encouraging courting with such things himself, writing a play that isn’t in Joyce’s shadow but capable of standing after it. “Joyce has a stunning dialectic between sincerity and irony,” he says. “Because they’re no longer actually at odds with each other. And I suppose that [approach] is peppered into this play.” Druid, he approves, leans into such attractive contradictions, divining the logic at the back of “the mystery”, little by little. “They include the shadows,” Watkins says, earlier than returning to the birthday party.
