Photo by Richard Termine
The second annual 1st Irish Festival is starting to get to me. First there was the confusing slang of Spinning the Times. Then it was the thick accents of The Pride of Parnell Street. And now it’s the terrible Irish accents of the little-known comedy Is Life Worth Living?, dug up and dusted off by The Mint Theater.
At least, I think that’s an Irish accent Kevin Kilner is periodically attempting as actor Hector De La Mere. Truthfully, he doesn’t try very often, and when he does, it’s even odds whether or not he’ll sound more Russian than Irish. The effect is both unnerving and annoying. Director Jonathan Bank (who reveals a decided non-talent for the rhythms of comedy) couldn’t coax out a more consistent accent? We’re in New York City, after all—surely actors with a facility for dialects can’t be that difficult to find?
And yet they seem to be, judging from the cast. A plodding comedy about a group of actors who come to a sleepy Irish village with a repertory company brimming with the gloom and doom of Chekhov and Ibsen, Is Life Worth Living? boasts more than its share of bum accents. And as Hector’s wife Constance Constantia, Jordan Baker doesn’t even try to evoke Ireland, coming across instead as a hammier Katharine Hepburn.
The plot itself is maddening: The villagers, content to keep their misery and unhappiness to themselves, are loosened up by all that Sturm und Drang they witness from Hector and Constance on stage every night and start revealing their miserable inner lives. Innkeepers John (Paul O’Brien) and Annie (Baibre Dowling) are the only ones who remain exempt—in Annie’s case, because she has no inner life. And like some complacent movie from the Golden Age of Hollywood, playwright Lennox Robinson contrives to convince us that there’s no place for art that causes small town audiences to question their lives.
What’s worse is that we’re supposed to laugh at everyone who gets carried away by A Doll’s House or Dance of Death. Annie, smug and vain, chips away at the effect these plays have on her neighbors with gentle mockery, safely ensconced in her pastel sitting room (the set design from Susan Zeeman Rogers is less period perfect and more Laura Ashley). By making us laugh, she implicates us in her pettiness and narrow-mindedness. Dowling does nothing to make Annie palatable, tossing out ambiguous comments about the plays and actors with an indestructible smile. And who can blame her, when her son (Graham Outerbridge) contemplates suicide after being rejected by pretty visitor Christine (Leah Curney, also struggling with her accent) and her dotty sister-in-law (Margaret Daly) has unearthed a long forgotten romance and polished it up into a full-out jilting?
But there’s something infuriating about a play that so smugly congratulates its audiences on being worldlier than these sheltered villagers. At a time now when Broadway producers—a far cry from a traveling Irish repertory company—choose to fills theaters with revivals of plays and musicals embraced by high schools across the country (Blithe Spirit, All My Sons, Bye Bye Birdie), what Hector and Constance are doing seems almost painfully quixotic. Bringing culture to the masses? God forbid!
Is Life Worth Living? through
Oct 11, at The Mint Theater, 311 W. 43rd St. (betw. 8th & 9th Aves.),
212-315-0231, $35.
