'The Drunkard': Enough Already!
Solas Nua's Production Is So Heavy On the Melodrama It Finally Stumbles
By Nelson Pressley
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Melodrama -- pure as an ingenue's virtue! Dastardly as a villain's darkest dreams! A poor widow and her daughter can't pay the rent, and the handsome rogue who steps in to save them turns out to be a rotten lush. What to do, what to do ?
Why, swoon and declaim, that's what! Director Jessica Burgess racks up points for old-fashioned style in Solas Nua's production of "The Drunkard," a popular 19th-century American temperance play recently adapted by Irish playwright Tom Murphy.
This is melodrama as you haven't seen it since silent movies, with footlights at Georgetown University's Devine Theatre casting a sinister glow, a black-caped scoundrel twirling his mustache, and two musicians holding up cards cueing the audience to boo and hiss.
It's all well executed and firmly tongue-in-cheek . . . but is it enough to save the dubious script? Murphy's play, transplanted to Ireland but not updated, weaves and blathers like a poor sot who can't find his way home.
To be sure, the characters have the excessive flamboyance of stock figures, and the actors play their types to the hilt. Patrick Bussink is a maudlin spectacle as Edward Kilcullen, the title's hapless drunkard. Edward is the victim of a scheme and is prey to his own worst alcoholic instincts, a brutal combination that makes him pitiable, especially in his own eyes. When Kilcullen implores the audience for some moral advice (the production is full of asides), Bussink's pathetic gaze rivals that of "Shrek's" Puss in Boots.
The showiest role goes to the bad guy, of course, and Jonathon Church plays the evil Phelim McGinty like a rat basking in the limelight. McGinty has designs on the cottage owned by Kilcullen and occupied by the lovely Arabella (soon enough Kilcullen's wife) and her widowed mother. "I'll have that cottage!" McGinty vows, and Church's shifty eyes and wiggling brows win the crowd's boos and laughter.
If the roles are fragrant, the florid language is positively intoxicating. "I long to hear my first name issue from her lips," poetically intones Sir Arden Rencelaw, the pious narrator who occasionally steps into the story to lend a hand. As Rencelaw, Steven J. Hoochuk rolls his r's impressively. Like the fretting of Julia Stemper's Arabella and the ravings of Stephanie Roswell as Agnes, the mysterious nut job who might hold the clue to it all, Hoochuk's supercilious turn is blissfully inflated.
Fun, fun, fun for an hour, but this goes on for more than 2 1/2 . Even amid the amusingly primitive painted scenery by Deb Sivigny and witty, original musical accompaniment by Jesse Terrill (who plays violin, piano and the nut job's brother), Burgess keeps the show from sliding all the way down to camp . . . yet it never steers onto a higher course, either. Kilcullen's struggles almost turn poignant, but the audience hasn't been primed to take anything seriously and the production doesn't make a firm tonal shift.
So after a tavern scene with songs and a singularly ugly puppet, the mechanics of plot kick in, the audience focuses (or not) on the mystery, Murphy withholds evidence, digresses, and the evening wallows.
Alas, like a true drunkard, it captures your attention and then wears you out.
