Feeling green on Broadway

Irish actors have to get past American preconceptions to find success on Broadway, reports Belinda McKeon from New York

'You know, I love New York to be a guest in. But that implies no desire to live here. To be here and looking for work . . . I don't know why, but it feels like it would be much tougher here. That's not based on any reality, just on a feeling, because I've never stuck around long enough to find out the reality."

As Nora Melody in the production of Eugene O'Neill's 1936 play A Touch of the Poet, which has just opened on Broadway, Dublin actor Dearbhla Molloy plays the long-suffering Irish wife to Gabriel Byrne's vainglorious fallen war hero Con; it is 1828, and the Irish couple are struggling to survive in an America which does not want them and their (or at least Con's) dreams of aspiration and entitlement. As Con swaggers around their Boston home, little more than a shebeen, in the tattered uniform of the major he once was, telling unlikely stories of the castle and the grandeur of his birth in Ireland, Nora works away quietly, trying desperately to keep their existence ticking over in the face of the destruction wrought by his denial.

It would, certainly, be going a little far to suggest that the play, produced by the Roundabout company and directed by Doug Hughes, acts as a metaphor for the situation faced by a typical Irish actor in New York, whether on or off Broadway. But for those who come here from Ireland seeking to tread the Manhattan boards, that tension between high ambition and sheer hard labour is a familiar one.

Molloy is right to surmise that the reality beyond her current, smoothly-running experience is a tough one. It's not simply that precious few Irish actors can expect to be greeted by an audience on Broadway with the warm applause received by Gabriel Byrne the moment he walked onto the stage of Studio 54 as the hungover, bad-tempered Con Melody.

Cillian Murphy might well receive that same welcome should he decide, as he has hinted that he will in recent interviews, to take a Broadway role next year. But for most Irish performers, a mild rippling of fondness for the softness of their accent is the most they can expect from New York audiences by way of an encouraging atmosphere.

And few, too, know the privilege of being invited to perform, whether on or off Broadway, rather than having to "hustle", as Molloy smilingly puts it, for parts.

The challenge of getting cast on Broadway is a difficult one for almost every actor in New York, not just for those who would like to play a role more fulfilling than that of a drunkard peasant. Though Cavan native Ciaran O'Reilly, who plays just such a role in A Touch of the Poet (and is the only other Irish actor onstage, in a cast of almost entirely Irish characters), is frank about the seeming impossibility of the prospect, he is not bitter.

As co-founder and producing director of the Irish Repertory Theatre, which aims, he says, "to present Irish art with a native understanding", and to hire Irish actors for its plays (including, most recently, productions of Philadelphia, Here I Come! and Beowulf), O'Reilly has striven to do something to provide an outlet for Irish work and Irish performers, rather than merely complaining about their lot. Still, he admits, challenges remain. The challenge of the accent, for example - the mere fact of having the genuine article rather than the version acquired by way of a dialect coach - is still possibly the biggest stumbling block facing Irish actors working in this town.

"If you see a company of actors doing a play, and some of them are putting on Irish accents and they're not getting it exactly right, well, when you're from Ireland, you do tend to pick up on that," says O'Reilly.

"People can do exquisite accents, all rhythm and music, but you still know it's not the real thing. But still, when the punter decides just to accept that and to go with it, they enjoy it more. But if suddenly one Irish actor is stuck in there with a true accent, that can upset the balance. Then you have what the audience will describe as a really thick accent, a different accent, something they never would have missed if it wasn't there."

O'Reilly remembers losing parts because he was judged as "too Irish". Unless the full cast is Irish, he says, directors regard it as too much of a risk to hire an Irish actor who could expose the shortcomings of those around him onstage where enunciation and rhythm are concerned. "It's Catch 22," says O'Reilly.

Pauline Turley, who is director at another of the three major outlets for Irish work in Manhattan, the Irish Arts Centre, agrees. "Someone straight off the boat doesn't realise it, but they're already disadvantaged because of their accent," she says. "At least in Dublin you are an actor first and foremost. Here you are an Irish actor."

That's a frustrating bind for many practitioners who come to New York hoping for richer opportunities. Mark Byrne, who played Howie in a recent production of Mark O'Rowe's Howie the Rookie at the Irish Arts Centre, knows the frustration of having a Dublin accent in Manhattan."Don't let them know that you're Irish," is the advice he often gets from colleagues on his way to see a casting director.

The lingering perception that Irish actors lack the training of their American peers is another problem, he says; like many Irish performers here, he is a graduate of the Samuel Beckett Centre, the school of drama at Trinity College, but says that "maybe four people" will recognise such a qualification. "Most of them aren't too sure who Samuel Beckett is," he says dryly.

The training issue is a serious one, says George C Heslin, a Limerick-born actor who has lived and worked in New York for the best part of a decade, and who, as founder and director of Origin Theatre Company, is also striving to create new opportunities in the field. Heslin himself has trained in New York, with the famous teacher Uta Hagen, and believes that Irish actors coming here should avail of the climate of constant training and re-training. But one of the biggest obstacles facing Irish actors here, says Heslin, is that the CV they bring with them from home, however impressive, may simply not translate.

"The big thing is that Irish credits are not recognised in New York," he says. "Even if you've done 15 plays at the Abbey, you have to build up American credits before they will take you seriously. It's not that they don't care, but that they don't all know what the Abbey equals . . . and the Project Arts Centre, Rough Magic, Passionmachine, Fishamble . . . they need to know what those companies mean in relation to New York."

With his company, which produces modern European work - most recently another Mark O'Rowe play, Crestfall - Heslin hopes to do something about this scenario, by bringing Irish companies over to produce work off-Broadway. In 2006, Gúna Nua will be the first visitors of this type, facilitated by Origin. He hopes, in the future, to assist other companies in building similar relationships with audiences and practitioners here.

Undoubtedly the most successful Irish actor of all on Broadway in the past 10 years is Brian F O'Byrne, like O'Reilly a Cavan native, who hit Manhattan's glitziest marquees first in the late 1990s in Druid's productions of Martin McDonagh's The Beauty Queen of Leenane and The Lonesome West.

Both performances earned him Tony nominations, as did his more recent turns on Broadway, in Byrony Lavery's Frozen last year (for which he won the award), and in John Patrick Shanley's Doubt, in which O'Byrne is next month due to finish his run (although he and Cherry Jones, the female lead, will possibly come with the show to the Abbey in summer 2006).

But O'Byrne, who came to New York 16 years ago, is very conscious of what he calls "the flipside" of having, as a sort of support network, a canon of Irish works in and through which to grow as a performer. "We are an ethnic group," he says. "Maybe to a slightly lesser degree now, but theatre is still very Anglo-centric. And there is certainly a slight inferiority complex within American theatre toward the British. As in, American theatre is relatively new, and anything that comes over here from Britain is like something from the gospel according to the great theatre tradition out of England. And if a director is going to take a risk outside of American actors, they're going to go for English actors first."

O'Byrne is uninterested in talk of competition between Irish actors here; it's such a small scene, he says, that to think of it in terms of competition would be to stunt your chances of developing as a performer. As a young actor, he arrived into two separate Irish-in-America scenes, both of which inspired him: the older generation of actors who had come to New York with the original production of Philadelphia, Here I Come! and had settled, and the band of young musicians, writers and artists who "were lounging around the East Village trying to understand our identity". Both fuelled his work, he says, and made him feel that he was trying to "enter into an artistic realm" rather than into a dog-eat-dog contest for roles.

Still, as intensely as Irish actors may immerse themselves in the creation of less mainstream art, and as satisfying as the results may be, O'Byrne is realistic about the buzz that every performer in this city, Irish or not, is chasing. "Of course, nothing beats a show on Broadway," he smiles.

"You're pulled into the whole scene, and Americans are so good both at being positive and at bringing this open dialogue to theatre . . . if you are on Broadway, and if you are working for profit, there's nothing like it."