"Keats was right. Everything falls apart,” Bobcat Goldthwait says in one of his comic riffs. Not quite. It was William Butler Yeats who wrote, “Things fall apart,” in his poem “The Second Coming.”
“The Second Coming” also includes the lines: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ are full of passionate intensity.” You probably heard a political commentator on one of the cable stations quote it this election season.Yeats’ words have entered the public’s subconscious—immortality, however mangled, for a poet.
But Yeats, who won the Nobel Prize in 1923, always thought of himself as a playwright, a poet of the stage. He helped found the Irish Literary Theatre in 1899 and the Irish National Theatre Society in 1903, which became known as the Abbey Theatre: the National Theatre of Ireland. He wrote 26 plays. Still, how often are Yeats’ plays staged here in New York? Not very.
In a season where absurdist playwright Eugene Ionesco’s Exit the King enters strongly, and fellow Irishman Samuel Beckett’s classic absurdist comedy Waiting for Godot waits in the wings, Irish Repertory Theatre’s The Yeats Project—which coincides with the 70th anniversary of the author’s death—attempts to show New Yorkers the dramatic range of the man Producing Director Ciarán O’Reilly says “preceded the avant-garde.”
Like Thornton Wilder, whose Our Town captivates downtown at the Barrow Street Theatre, Yeats took inspiration from Japanese theatre—specifically, from the slow, sonorous movements and masks used in Noh. Diverse, fusion-conscious, and identityaware—he’s ripe for a 21st-century revival.
Eight of Yeats’ one-act plays run in alternating rep over the course of two nights, directed by Irish Repertory Theatre’s O’Reilly and Artistic Director Charlotte Moore.The remaining 18 plays are receiving concert readings. It’s a large undertaking:There are screenings of films, evenings of poetry, lectures, music and an evening of dance from Darrah Carr Dance company, in what she calls Mod-ERIN style, a blend of Irish step and contemporary dance. “Our inclusion in the project shines a light on Yeats’ love of dance,” says Carr. That love is apparent in Yeats’ Noh-flavored play Full Moon in March, which offers a lengthy pas de deux with a severed head.
The plays aren’t done very often here because “They’re too hard!” says the Irish Rep’s Moore. “It’s not television acting.”
O’Reilly thinks the dramatist just needs hype. “Yeats was so far ahead of his time… in The Cat and the Moon, there’s a blind man and beggar coming in. It’s Godot, 50 years before Beckett wrote it.Without Yeats, there wouldn’t have been Beckett.”
The plays “are not chic and scatological and slight like so much of the stuff coming from Ireland today,” sniffs Moore.That said, she sees playwrights Enda Walsh and Tom Murphy as Yeats’ direct descendants. The connection is in the attention to language.
Some of the plays, like The Pot of Broth, are comic folk tales; some echo French Symbolism; others use masks (designed by Wicked’s Bob Flanagan) and are inspired by Japanese theater.
“We are the pre-eminent Irish theater in the United States, why wouldn’t we celebrate the man who gave Ireland her national identity?” asks O’Reilly.
The 1902 short Cathleen Ni Houlihan is most tightly linked with Irish nationalism. “When I see that play I feel it might lead a man to do something foolish,” said Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw after seeing it in 1909. In fact, Sean Connolly, one of the first people killed in the Easter Rising of 1916, was an Abbey Theatre actor slated to perform in the play that week. “Did that play of mine send out/ Certain men the English shot?” Yeats later wrote in “The Man and the Echo.”
It helps to know that the play is set in 1798: the year of the Irish Rebellion. And the stolen “four green fields” lamented by the mysterious old woman symbolize the green land of Erin.
“These plays show Yeats’ vision of an ancient Ireland that was heroic, and a modern Ireland that’s liberated,” says Andy McGowan, president of the WB Yeats Society of New York. He uses Irish mythology, but the ideals that come through the play will strike chords for anyone,” says O’Reilly. In other words, not only the Irish need apply. “The plays should be honored—because they’re good.”
> The Yeats Project
Through May 3, Irish Repertory Theatre, 132 W. 22nd St. (betw. 6th & 7th Aves.), 212-727-2737, www.irishrep.org; times vary, $20 .
