Home >  A & E

Friday, May 31, 2002

By Christopher Rawson, Post-Gazette Drama Editor

Told that his namesake was mayor of Pittsburgh, he laughed, all the way from far-off Dublin.

	'The Gigli Concert' WHERE: Pittsburgh Irish & Classical Theatre at Hamburg Studio, City Theatre, 13th and Bingham, South Side. WHEN: Through June 15; 8 p.m. Wed.-Sat.; 2 p.m. Sun.; also 8 p.m. June 15. TICKETS: $22-$25; 412-394-3353. For a previous survey of Irish playwrights in Pittsburgh: Three Irish playwrights transform Pittsburgh into the emerald city

The name may be the Irish equivalent of John Smith, but about this Tom Murphy, there's nothing common. Of the leading Irish playwrights, he is "the most powerful" says Charlotte Moore, artistic director of New York's Irish Repertory Theatre. "There's no body like him writing today. He has a terrific resonance in Ireland and all over the world."

But it's not a name we know much in America, let alone in Pittsburgh, the mayor notwithstanding. And that's odd, because any informed list of great Irish playwrights would group Murphy, born in 1935, with the older stars -- Hugh Leonard (born 1926), John B. Keane (1928) and Brian Friel (1929). Leading the middle generation would be Frank McGuiness (1953) and Sebastian Barry (1955); the younger, Martin McDonagh (1970) and Conor McPherson (1971).

That's a magical company of powerful word-spinners, and in some ways, Murphy is the strangest of all, which may explain his relative obscurity west of the Atlantic. "He writes terrifyingly about isolation," says Moore, "and most terrifyingly about masculinity and what it takes to be a man. He's a true original. He's tough."

For all Murphy's quality, then, he's a brave choice to produce. Having an Irish company, Moore can make that choice -- she did Murphy's most famous play, "A Whistle in the Dark," 10 years ago, and she's doing his "Bailegangaire" in August, with Murphy himself coming to direct Pauline Flanagan.

Sharing that bravery is Andrew Paul, artistic director of the professional Pittsburgh Irish & Classical Theatre, who has introduced Pittsburgh to other Irish playwrights. His choice is Murphy's 1983 "The Gigli Concert," now in previews, which PICT describes accurately as "a three-character drama of operatic proportions."

In it, an Englishman living in Dublin, J.P.W. King, is a so-called "dynamatologist." A client appears, "a depressed Irishman with a burning desire to sing like the great Italian tenor Gigli. Together, they embark on a spiritual journey to find their voice." Martin Giles, Larry John Meyers and Caitlin Clarke star in what Murphy himself calls "a marathon."

The play "aspires to music," Murphy says. Beniamino Gigli (1890-1957) was the greatest Italian operatic tenor of his day. He might have chosen the great Irish tenor, John McCormack, but Murphy says, "when I was growing up, as I arrived at manhood in the '50s, anything Irish was to me a pain in the ass."

His favorite tenor was actually Jussi Bjoerling, "for clarity and purity," but since the home of singing is Italy, he chose Gigli. "My childhood was peppered with hearing his arias on Irish radio. Even at the age of about 70, there was almost a boy soprano timbre to the voice, and I felt that was right ... to express the purity of the human spirit." For Murphy's depressed Irishman, the purity of the singing "begins to represent a purity he's lost, when he sold his soul for 2 million pounds."

If that sounds like a parable of Irish life, maybe so. As J.P.W. describes his view of the fallen, post-Eden world, he speaks of "feelings of simultaneous innocence and guilt . . . all the time trying to obliterate that side of their nature that was innocent and beautiful." That could speak about a certain Ireland, as well.

As Murphy describes it, he started writing plays because "in the middle of a Sunday morning situation 40 years ago," a dear friend, since dead, said, "why don't we write a play?" Asked what kind, he said, "one thing is certain, it's not going to be set in a kitchen!" So they set it outside a dance hall.

Murphy's first success (there have been two dozen plays since) was "A Whistle in the Dark." Turned down by the Abbey Theatre, it was staged by the adventuresome Theatre Royal in the East End of London.

Murphy calls the rejection "a good thing for me, because I would have settled for the Irish situation and domicility here." (He talks like that, seeming to savor the words, his mind darting ahead or sideways.)

Then Murphy himself moved to London for 10 years. "I wish I could say I was forced to go abroad, but there was none of that Joycean thing about it. I was a school teacher; I had a pensionable job. It broke my mother's heart, because I'd had the incredible success to become a teacher." By living abroad, he says, meeting people from all over the world, "the eye at that geographical remove became more observant and particular."

To explain, he indulges: "I'm reminded of the universality of the fairy tale -- the witch slain, the dragon killed, the princess found. I interpreted that as slaying one's home town and country, and finding oneself to be the prince."

The '50s were a "dormant decade" in Ireland, Murphy says, with even the arts celebrating isolationism. In opposition, he took to foreign playwrights: Tennessee Williams (not Arthur Miller, who seemed to lecture), Ugo Betti, Lorca. "It wasn't until a decade later that the genius of Sean O'Casey came to me, and I only found the greatest of our writers, Synge, through Lorca."

As to why he hasn't been produced more in America, he says, "Of course I'd like the wider audience, but at this stage of my life, I'm losing no sleep over it. ... I write for myself, for God and for actors, and I count myself successful, lucky, even, in that on the whole, God, myself and the actors seem happy with the situation."

Murphy has some contempt for critical stratagems, such as the "solicitous phrase" that misrepresents by categorizing. "I do feel uneasy about the facility with which people reduce plays to a phrase." But pushed, he says, "I try to re-create or create the feeling of life. I don't say I achieve it, but that's an aspiration. ... If somebody said to me, what's the play about, and I said, 'my life,' that'd be an answer."