HOW TO WRITE AN IRISH PLAY

A metafictional two-act play offers a pastiche of Irish dramatic tropes.

Oscar Wilde. Sean O’Casey. Brendan Behan. Brian Friel. Irish playwrights have long cast a shadow over the American theater—for reasons both deserved and undeserved. Grissmer has written a play that explains and portrays that influence. “Irish playwrights are acknowledged the world over as masters of the dramatic art,” asserts Clyde, the narrator. “So therefore it is my intention tonight to take you for a walk through a typical Irish play, to give you a close-up experience of the qualities which make Irish plays the bosses of the theatrical world.” The play is set in a rural pub called the Horse’s Glass, and it’s populated by your standard small-town Irish characters. There’s the surly bartender, the parish priest with a secret, the beautiful American woman who’s just arrived in the village—she and her husband are looking to buy land to build a factory—and Clyde, of course, the consummate stage Irishman who may or may not be hallucinating the audience and the alleged playwright, Shawn Michael O’Mooney. There isn’t much of a plot, though that doesn’t stop the characters from attempting to guess what will happen, inevitably acting out the time-honored themes of repression, obsession, and secrecy—unless they can discover a way to break the formula, that is. Grissmer’s dialogue never quite conjures the poetry and wit found in the sort of plays he is parodying, though he does provide some clever exchanges: “ANNA: What kind of a play is it? CLYDE: It’s a tragedy of course. A gritty Irish tragedy. ANNA: Oh, well, sorry. I don’t feel in the least bit tragic or gritty. CLYDE: Give it time, we’re only in the first act. Everything is delightful in the first act.” The postmodernism evokes a different, equally robust branch of the Irish literary tradition—the one practiced by Flann O’Brien, Samuel Beckett, and Behan, too, at times—though even Grissmer would likely admit that Irish theater has always done a fair bit of winking. His play will prove fun for anyone familiar with the source material, though it never really rises much above the level of a loving, ribbing homage.

An enjoyable, if imperfect, fourth-wall-breaking riff on Irish plays and their underlying tensions.