Nw York City gardening on our walk to the play.
THEATER
Theater Four
The Mountains Look Different
"A FORGOTTEN 1948 DRAMA BY MICHEÁL MAC LIAMMÓIR HAS BEEN POLISHED TO A BECOMING SHIMMER AT THEATER ROW…WHAT’S ALLURING HERE IS THE STORYTELLING, BY BOTH MAC LIAMMÓIR AND THE ACTORS, WHOSE ACROSS-THE-BOARD RESTRAINT ROOTS THE CHARACTERS IN REALITY THROUGHOUT."
The New York Times
"The Mountains Look Different is the story of Bairbre’s return home to Ireland, after a dozen hard years in London working the streets. Three days ago, she married Tom, who knows nothing of her past. Together they hope to settle with Tom’s father on his farm, and live a simple life far from the temptations and torments of the sinful city. But soon they will learn that it’s not easy for anyone to escape their past, even among the rocks and ruins of the mountainside.
The idea for the play struck mac Liammóir after working on Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie. He wondered what happened to Anna after the fall of the curtain. Then one day he saw a young married woman in Connemara looking out of the window at a motorcar who said with the slight hint of a London accent in her voice, “They look different from what they did when I was little—the mountains, I mean.”
Mountains stoked controversy in conservative Dublin in 1948. One night, two men left their seats at intermission and asked the audience to join with them in leaving the theater. Shouts of “Sit down” and “If you don’t like it leave” came from the audience; the ushers started towards the men, then the orchestra began to play and drowned out the protest. A handful of theatergoers left and the next day, every paper in Dublin told the story.
The play continued without interruption and received an enthusiastic ovation, including calls for the author. mac Liammóir himself played the role of Tom, so of course he heard the protest,but he said nothing. Later, he told the Irish Independent “that he believed the men who made the protest were sincere, but that it was a pity they had not waited to hear what the play had to say in the final act.”
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Con Horgan, left, and Brenda Meaney as his daughter-in-law in “The Mountains Look Different.” Both are trying to reinvent themselves, just as the play’s author did.
Review: In ‘The Mountains Look Different,’ Sin, Shame and Self-Determination
Tom and Bairbre met in the rain, outside a London pub called the Garden of Eden. She asked him for a light, and they stood in an archway to share her cigarette.
“You looked too nice to be good,” he tells her later, after they’re married, and by nice he means sexy, not like the unadorned rural women he knew back home in western Ireland. That’s where Bairbre’s from, too, as it happens, but after 13 years away, she’s grown worldly — far more so than Tom, who in the early days of their acquaintance batted away the flickering thought that this enchanting creature might in fact “be one of them bad ones.”
That is to say, a prostitute. Which, up until their courtship, Bairbre had been — a fact she conceals from her darling naïf so she can make a new start with him. Rotten luck for them both, really, that when Tom takes her to meet his father, the glowering old brute remembers an evening abroad, years before, when he paid for her company.
The Mint Theater, which specializes in excavating forgotten gems, has found a solid one in “The Mountains Look Different,” a 1948 drama by Micheál Mac Liammóir that the director Aidan Redmond has polished to a becoming shimmer at Theater Row.
It is not, truth be told, a visually splendid production; the set (by Vicki R. Davis) has a cheap look, which seems not to bode well. And, full disclosure, there is some dancing of a jig — part of the celebration of a midsummer festival, which is underway when Bairbre (Brenda Meaney) and Tom (Jesse Pennington) arrive at the thatched-roof farmhouse of his father, Martin (Con Horgan), where they plan to settle down.
What’s alluring here is the storytelling, by both Mac Liammóir and the actors, whose across-the-board restraint roots the characters in reality throughout. And if you know something about Mac Liammóir (1899-1978), Bairbre’s determination to remake herself takes on further resonance. Mac Liammóir, one of the founders of the Gate Theater in Dublin, was actually an Englishman named Alfred Willmore. An actor as well as a playwright, he reinvented himself so convincingly as an Irishman that his masquerade was only revealed, by biographers, a dozen years after his death.
Shame — Bairbre’s, for the life she led, and Martin’s, for the night he spent with her — is the force that drives this play, set in an isolated landscape where Roman Catholicism twines with pagan superstitions, and the supernatural is never far away.
In this part of the world, redemption is an unlikely outcome for a woman who abandoned sexual innocence without the blessing of the church. But Mac Liammóir has a striking sympathy for Bairbre, who sold her body as a way to survive.
“’Tis ones like yourself is the shame of the world,” her taciturn, menacing father-in-law says.“A woman can’t sell nothing without there’s a call for it, don’t you believe it,” she replies.
What she wants is for Tom to save her, but when Martin threatens their happiness, she has to save herself. If that makes her bad, it’s a sin she’s willing to live with.
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