Further into the west

The Abbey's burgeoning presence in New York was apparent this week with the US premiere of its recent production of a Sam Shepard play writes BELINDA McKEON

IT'S A PLAY about two American characters, set on an American frontier, and written by one of America's most important playwrights – but it has an Irish passport, and this week it came under the exacting gaze of audiences and critics in New York. The Abbey Theatre's production of Ages of the Moon, the play written by Sam Shepard last year for the Abbey and for Irish actors Sean McGinley and Stephen Rea, had its US premiere on Wednesday night. It was presented by Manhattan's Atlantic Theater Company, the famed off-Broadway group founded by David Mamet, which has in recent years developed a strong relationship with Irish playwrights and production companies. As well as the cast and the director, Jimmy Fay (working for the first time in New York), a number of the original Irish production team travelled with the show, supported in part by Culture Ireland.

The play, which features McGinley and Rea as middle-aged friends reunited after many years, squabbling and reminiscing on the porch of a cabin in an unnamed rural outpost, revisits and interrogates terrain which is familiar to Shepard: the mythologies of masculinity and of American identity. After a fortnight of previews, opening night saw an audience of mainly invited guests follow Shepard’s characters through their long, bourbon-drinking day. Among the guests were playwright Martin McDonagh, actors Jim Norton and Pat Shortt, director Garry Hynes, producer Todd Kessler, David O’Sullivan of the Ireland-US Council, consul general Niall Burgess, and actor Jessica Lange, wife of the playwright. Also sizing up Shepard’s characters as they swung punches, stared down a shotgun barrel and exploded an annoying ceiling fan was the Detroit-based Irish boxing star, Andy Lee.

Speaking after the performance, Atlantic Theater Company’s artistic director, Neil Pepe, said that the play had made New York audiences “very aware of Shepard all over again”. Pepe said that the production came out of “four or five years of discussion” with Fiach Mac Conghail, director of the Abbey, about the possibility of a collaboration. The two companies are now talking about more such exchanges in the future.

Mac Conghail, meanwhile, described the experience of bringing Shepard’s play to New York as part of what he saw as “a circular, centuries-old dialogue between Ireland and America” which tapped into both the Abbey’s relationship with the US (“the Abbey has been coming here since Yeats organised a 30-day tour in 1911”) and Shepard’s affinity with the work of Irish playwrights, chiefly Samuel Beckett.

Having brought Mark O'Rowe's Terminusand Shepard's Kicking A Dead Horseto another off-Broadway venue, the Public Theater, in 2008, this represents the Abbey's third outing to New York under Mac Conghail's stewardship. Part of his ambition for the Abbey, Mac Conghail said, was to have "almost an annual presence in New York" with an Abbey production.

“It has been a deliberate artistic development,” he said. “It’s not easy coming here, but a lot of the future artistic and also financial survival of the Abbey is in the US.”

He is currently in the process of establishing an American foundation for the Abbey.

Reviews of the production began to come through at midnight, with critics largely praising the play's slow burn from weariness to profundity, and enjoying the Beckettian resonances. At the same time, some wanted the piece to pack a fuller, angrier punch. Ben Brantley, in the New York Times, while praising the play as "a poignant and honest continuation" of themes central to Shepard's oeuvre, called for more "visceral charge", a demand echoed by Variety, whose reviewer lauded the pacing and the performances, but looked for a greater "sense of danger".

Next time, they may well find themselves sitting closer to that exploding fan.