“Ulster American” is another triumph by the Irish Rep. The play comes at you from field left.
We are waiting for fictional playwright Ruth Davenport to enter stage left, as the play opens. The audience is as impatient as the two characters on stage, Hollywood film star Jay Conway (Matthew Broderick) and English theatre director Leigh Carver (Max Baker). The pair, sitting in Leigh’s living room, strain to find a common language in a wonderfully directed (Ciaran O’Reilly) study of awkwardness.
Ruth (Geraldine Hughes) explodes onto the stage. Talking rapid-fire she explains her delayed arrival from Belfast was caused by such a vicious row with her mother that she crashed the car en route to the airport.
It's a savagely funny story, which signals a wild ride to come: an irreverent and unpredictable play, which addresses a difficult connection with the motherland.
Ireland–the too perfectly named playwright–says in a program note that as an Ulster Protestant loyal to the British crown, “I had an antipathy to Irish culture because to me it represented the people who were trying to kill us.” David Ireland adds that he had long stayed away from The Troubles in his work because the theme seemed hackneyed. This play is anything but.
While writing from his roots, Ireland produced something universal and, for a 2016 work, something prescient given how dominant identity politics have become. How we each see ourselves versus how we are seen provides him great scope for satire. Not just identity writ large—race, ethnicity, or gender—but also class, and one’s sometimes grandiose self-perceptions.
Ruth insists she is Irish, but “real British people” would disagree, her longtime director tells her, once the gloves come off. Jay, an American, thinks he is Irish, and is equally misinformed about his role, for which rehearsals are to start the next day.
What starts as a comedy of errors will eventually devolve into a dark farce. As the woman beside me said after the dizzying 90 minutes, she will tell her friends that the show is great, but she’s not sure what else so as not to give it away.
The play opens with the two male characters trading their New Man credentials. Leigh will later add, “I wish I was f***ing trans! That’s how much of a feminist I am.” Jay is even more self-deluded, clueless and hilariously inappropriate. Although he’s not stupid, as evidenced by remarks, such as, “The only thing I like to read from a critic is a suicide note.”
The performances are as good as the dialogue, which is so funny that the actors, all serious pros, could be seen at one stage trying to stop themselves from laughing.
Baker’s Leigh is a quintessentially stuffy and polite Brit. Hughes’s Ruth, despite her character’s insistence, seems stereotypically Irish in her feistiness and outspoken wit.
Broderick is performing for the fourth time at the Rep, where, in 2018, for example, he was wonderful in “The Seafarer" (see here). His performance initially seems surprisingly flat for a two-time Tony winner and film star, until you realize that he is playing a robotic character.
Jay is not just in “a program,” he is programmed. A bore—except when he veers wildly off his PC script. “What is there but truth?” Jay asks, though he’s as shallow as the next Hollywood celebrity. “I’ve never sought external validation,” he deadpans—before he will literally display how untrue that is.
The title “Ulster American” suggests a play that revolves around ethnicity. Yet, one truth it suggests is that male-versus-female remains the primal identity, even after much lip service to the Me-Too movement.
“Ulster American” by David Ireland, directed by Ciaran O’Reilly, and starring Matthew Broderick, opened at The Irish Repertory Theatre on W. 22nd St. in Manhattan on March 15. It runs until May 10. Tickets at irishrep.org.
