Playboy of The Western World
Playboy of The Western World
By John Millington Synge
Directed by Paul Luby
Starring Evan Chiovari, George Colangelo, and Paul Luby
Seminole State College Fine Arts Theatre, Sanford FL</strong><P>
Thank God we have the Irish to put on stage! Ireland is an endless source of depravation and deprivation, and the animal sprit of storytelling makes their tales of misery and hope tailor made for theater. Chris Mahon (Chiovari) is on the run, he claims to have murder his father (Colangelo) but he’s awful forthcoming about a hanging crime. He appears at a small rural pub run by Mike Flaherty (Luby) and his lonely daughter Pegeen (Victoria Barfield). Rather than eschew a murderer, they take him in, feed him and soon there’s a bidding war between Pegeen and Widow Quinn (Molly Wuerz) for his hand. A decent looking young man without the local poteen fueled brutally is a rare find, whatever his other faults. As time goes by, he seems to be sitting high: the women are fighting over him, the men in awe, and life looks good. Until we discover he didn’t exactly split dead old das head from crown to gob.
Chiovari displays a good balance of put-upon charm combined with ballsy bravado. He’s a low grade con man at the open and a journeyman at the end; he’s driven from the town but not without a better pair of boots and a better sense of what he can get away with. Colangelo stole the back half of the show, his crown may have ached but he’s funny and dramatic and playing his role for maximum sympathy on stage and off. I loved the cat fight between Barfield and Wuerz; Wuerz seemed the better catch excerpt for the fact Barfield had money. And the love of money is up there with the love of booze and the love of misery in these sorts of Irish kitchen sinks. High marks also go to Christopher Logan as Shawn Pegeen’s ineffectual suitor. He may be mopish and weak on stage, but he gets one of the slyest laugh lines in the third act when his drunken compatriots hand him a rope and tell him “you do it, you’re the least drunk.”
And that brings up an odd point of this performance – it’s a rather broad comedy and was funny, but drew few and often isolated laughs. Perhaps it was the small house or the three page phrase book in the program (required reading) as the brogue is thick and the language almost Gaelic. It’s the sort of show that requires strict concentration by the audience. When originally staged the show brought on riots, but the political and cultural offences that may lurk here are dulled by time and space. There’s not smell of peat fire in the theater and the whiskey looks watered, but this is a solid Irish drama executed with panache.
For more information on the Seminole State College Theater program, please visit http://www.seminolestate.edu/arts/theatre/boxoffice.htm
