All’s not well on the ’Row


Gina Costigan, who stars in “Crackskull Row,” on the left, with playwright Honor Molloy.
CAT DWYER/CATSEYEPIX.COM

 

By Peter McDermott
pmcdermott@irishecho.com

“Death was at my back,” Honor Molloy recalled of the weeks she was writing “Crackskull Row” in 1999.

Her father, the pioneering Irish actor John Molloy, had just died on the West Coast.

“He was a resident of Berkeley, of all places,” she said of a man who’d spent his 70 years almost entirely in Dublin.

Then her sister was told she was terminally ill. “She was given six months,” Molloy said. “She lived six weeks.”

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Although the play had remained unproduced until 2016 – it will debut as part of Origin’s 9th Annual 1st Irish Theatre Festival on Thursday – she said that in the intervening years “a lot of good stuff came out of writing it.”

For one thing, Molloy got a year-long Harvard fellowship.

But ultimately, a play is a collaborative process. “It’s never finished until it’s on the stage,” she said.

“It's great to see these Dublin actors work on the text,” Molloy said of Terry Donnelly, Colin Lane and Gina Costigan. They are joined by John Charles McLaughlin, an American actor, and directed by Kira Simring.

“Crackskull Row” is set in a particular place, the partly real, partly mythological Dublin home in which she lived as a child.

“My father fixed up a carriage house on Ely Place from the 1800s,” said his third-born child. “It was tiny, but eventually eight people lived in it.”

Her mother, Reading, Pa., native Yvonne Voight, had gone to Trinity College Dublin in 1953 to study for her PhD in English literature. She met in that city a mesmerizing talent who’d dropped out of school at age 14 and had subsequently been a tuberculosis patient for six years. By 1969, though, Voight had had enough and left with her six children for Allentown in her native state.

The Molloys had their problems, serious ones, but they were bohemians and artists – John, the son of a circus acrobat, was at the time starring in Ireland’s first TV soap opera “Tolka Row.” The Moorigans of “Crackskull Row,” in contrast, are a family on the margins, and the sort that stayed marginal with the advent of the Celtic Tiger.

The action of the play moves between 1966 and 1999. In the latter year, according to the advance publicity, “Rasher Moorigan has finally been released from prison for a monstrous crime he committed over 30 years before. He travels down the back lanes to visit his mother Masher, an old woman haunted by a vanished Dublin, and together they confront the ghosts of the past and an uncertain future. Melding reality and myth, ‘Crackskull Row’ is the story of one Irish family’s desperate actions and forbidden loves.”

“Dolly is literally a sexual object,” Molloy revealed of Masher’s earlier life. “She says: ‘All I have to make an honest shilling is the body I stand up in.’”

The playwright called it with dark humor an “everyday tale of magic, incest and ghosts.”

The work switches between realism and magical realism. “Memory carries it back and forth between those worlds,” she said.

She recalled of the weeks back in 1999: “The writing of it was truly haunting and magical.”

Her father’s death meant she didn’t have to answer to him. And her sister’s made her want to break the cycle of violence and abuse generally in her family.

Molloy’s novel “Smarty Girl” (2012), much of which was written during her Harvard year, was more obviously drawn from her family’s Dublin experience. She said she aimed to explain how she ended up at age 8 in the United States. (“Smarty Girl” was also issued in audio-book format by Simon & Schuster).

In a 2012 interview in the Echo, Molloy recalled of the father she got to know again at age 21 when she returned to Dublin: “There was so much beauty and humor and fun. He had such a great imagination.

“You could fix anything, you could solve any problem, and then there were days he just made all the problems,” she added.

“Smarty Girl,” she said, was an attempt to find out what “broke” her father. The story she set out to write was “about acting. It was about alcoholism. It was the bloodline. It was about tuberculosis. It was about theater as a disease, as a kind of curse.”

But seeing “Crackskull Row” in rehearsal and the set being put together last Sunday, she was struck by theatre’s beauty.

“The way it brings all art forms together,” Molloy said. “So the work doesn't merely hang on the wall. It moves, takes place ‘in 20 dimentias,’ as Masher Moorigan would say.”

“Crackskull Row,” a cell theatre production, opens tomorrow at the Workshop Theater Main Stage, 312 West 36th St. New York, NY 10018 (close to A, C, E trains at Penn Station subway stop) and will close on Sunday, Sept. 25. For performance times and tickets, call 1-800-838-3006. For more on the festival visit 1stIrish.org.

 

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