by Marc Stern
Professor and Chair, History Department, Bentley
College & co-producer RADIO with a VIEW
A Review of Shay Duffin as Brendan Behan: Confessions of an Irish Rebel performed at Jimmy Tingle’s Off-Broadway Theater, Davis Square, Somerville, MA.
Shay Duffin, now appearing at Jimmy Tingle’s Off-Broadway has ‘lived with’ or, more aptly, as the incredibly talented yet troubled radical Irish novelist, playwright and poet Brendan Behan, who died in 1964 of complications from alcoholism and diabetes, for over 20 years. Now in his late 50s, Duffin has walked in Behan’s shoes (quite literally after Brendan’s widow Beatrice gave them to him) through almost seven thousand performances. Few artists, most notably Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain, have channeled another character for so long, and fewer still have sustained the energy that Duffin brings to his presentation of a powerful yet tragic man. It is a remarkably personal, humane, passionate, and thoughtful dramatization of a talent destroyed by alcohol and fame.
We meet Behan, the author of such works as the autobiographical novel and play The Borstal Boy, The Hostage, and The Quare Fellow (a term for a condemned man) a few months before his death as he’s delivering a speech in New York on the Irish, their arts, and their role in Western history. The man who confronts us at the top of act one is genial, witty, cogent, and linguistically facile. After a walk through his personal story, some of his years in prison for activity in support of the IRA and the struggle against British control of the Northern provinces, his views on religion, and his varied career as a writer, sailor, housepainter, and pimp, he leaves us with the dissolute Behan on his last Guinness-sodden legs. We see him walk—or at least stumble—through this journey without rancor but with a sadness that pervades his brazen and bawdy language.
Behan was the product of a highly literate, musical (his uncle wrote the Irish national anthem), and passionately Republican working-class, Dublin family. Leaving school at 13, he became a housepainter, but IRA activities, including efforts to blow up a British battleship and to assassinate a police official, landed him in prison. Building on the tradition of Joyceian modernism flowing through the streets and pubs of Dublin, he crafted stories that spoke to the ironies and paradoxes of rebellion, commitment, and passion for Ireland. His success led to his lionization and his demise, as he drank his way through receptions, premiers, and awards. Love came late in life with his marriage to Beatrice, and even later with parenthood. Neither bond, however, was strong enough to get him to stop drinking.
Duffin, an exceptionally talented actor and auteur of real substance and verve, knew Behan when the writer was on his last legs in Dublin. Although that image was, originally, the last memory Duffin sought to leave with the audience, he has changed his play in recent years. He now returns to the stage and takes questions from the audience. At the showing I attended, these ranged from technical questions about how doing a show like this has changed over the many years (as he’s aged, he’s grown more understanding of Behan’s many flaws), to what he thinks Behan might feel about Ireland today (he would be appalled at the rise of an Ireland devoid of craque, or pleasant interchange, where money and cell phones rule life), to queries about his own storied acting career.
This was a literate, funny, passionate, and emotionally gripping night of theater. Shay Duffin will be appearing in Brendan Behan: Confessions of an Irish Rebel, from now through March 31, at Jimmy Tingle’s Off-Broadway Theater in Somerville. Performances are scheduled for Thursday to Saturday evenings at 7:30 p.m., with a Sunday matinee at 3 and several additional performances.
03.04.07
Marc reviews "Marx in Soho" by Howard Zinn. Presented by The Iron Age Theater with Bob Weick as Marx.
As Howard Zinn told the sold out house following the presentation of his one-man show, “Marx in Soho” at Jimmy Tingle’s Off-Broadway on Thursday, no one had ever done a play, movie, or TV show about Karl (not Groucho) Marx before he wrote this play a few years ago. Radical political theoreticians don’t generally make for good drama unless they’re also mounting the barricades, but Zinn’s Marx, well played by Philadelphian Robert Weick, who really does look quite a bit like the German philosopher, is a passionate dweller in the slums of Soho, London, and his passion fuels a powerful night of theater and history.
The Marx we meet has come back to speak with us from the great beyond. Although his German accent has clearly faded over a century in heaven (it comes back unevenly every now and then), he has lost none of the zeal that led him to work and write about issues of social justice, economic exploitation, and capitalist market economics for almost half the nineteenth century. He is watching and appalled at our culture and it’s fetishization of commodities. Are his ideas, as so many have suggested, dead with the Soviet empire? He patiently but vehemently explains his theories to us, and his pointed application of them to the present demonstrates otherwise.
He also leads us into a look at his own life, his marriage to Jenny, his children, and the poverty all endured. Along the way Marx becomes humanized in a profound way. Zinn helps the Marx of his play to portray a much more understanding and sympathetic (and I believe accurate), yet still committedly materialistic, view of religion than is usually allowed. He spends a great deal of time talking about his wife, her contributions to his work, her criticism of his opaque analytical writings, and her profound commitment to social justice. She was, Marx says, “a far better human being than I ever was.” He also hints at but never explicitly acknowledges his affair with their servant (sent by his in-laws, minor members of the German nobility), the pain this caused Jenny, and the damage it did to his marriage. He acknowledges and defends his often ponderous prose as the necessary outgrowth of complex analysis, while disdaining the hero-worship and dogmatic parroting of his words by acolytes who don’t really get it. “Is there anything more dull than reading political economy?” he asks, “Yes, writing it!” All the while he draws probing, humorous, but significant parallels with our own times, our own political miasma. The ideas are the ideas of Marx, but the words and the voice is the voice of Zinn. For the most part, it’s a good mix! It is idealistic materialism that brings the young and the old Marx into synch.
One of the most interesting elements of the play (for me as, in my former life, an anarcho-syndicalist) focuses on Marx’s constant and vitriolic battles with the Russian anarchist, Mikhial Bakunin. The two contested for the heart and soul of the radical labor movement for almost 35 years. While Bakunin doffed his cap to Marx the theoretician, he rejected the German’s faith in the ability of a revolution to craft a virtuous transitional state that would not become an abattoir. During the discussion that followed, Zinn noted that he put this discussion in as a cautionary about Marx, but I suggest it did not play as that because the description of the anarchists many personal flaws (all accurately portrayed, I must say) outweighed the legitimacy of his criticism in the play, if not in real life.
In a similar vein, Zinn passes rather quickly over Marx’s long and deep connection to Freidrich Engles. I do wish a bit more time had been spent considering this incredibly important connection. Engles was more than a benefactor to Marx. He was one of the world’s first great sociologists and, even more than the philosopher, a man at home with the Anglo-Irish working class. He brought verve into Marx’s prose and, it has been suggested, wrote some of the journalistic commentaries attributed to ‘the master’ in order to enable him to focus on his theoretical works, including both the Grundrisse and Capital. He deserved more consideration.
But these are minor quibbles. Weick has been performing this play 80 times a year at secondary schools, colleges, and theaters across the country for the past three years. It’s changed his sense of a life well lived. If you’re seeking an accessible, entertaining, and fun critique of a system that is, by and large, unchallenged at home (if not abroad), it could fit the bill for you as well. It may not change the mind of everyone in the audience, but I’d heartily recommend spending some time with Karl, his memories, and Howard Zinn’s vision of a humanistic Marxism rooted in an analysis of capitalism that remains profoundly appropriate and, in some ways, more important now than ever before.
As he says, “Jesus isn’t coming back, so they sent Karl Marx.”
02.18.07