Realistic Or Subversive?

By Gwen Orel

That will be very nice. Won't that be nice? Won't you stay for tea?

These sentiments recur so often in Teresa Deevy's 1936 play, Katie Roche, that they feel like the chorus of a musical.

It's a deeply odd play.

In those phrases are all the attempts the characters have to convince themselves all is well, or to hold their connection together. It rarely works.

The drama, which opened Monday, February 25 at The Mint Theater Company, 311 W. 43rd Street, is the third offering in The Mint's project of reclaiming the work of the neglected Irish playwright. The play runs through March 24.

The Mint's project began in 2010 with the extraordinary Wife to James Whelan (we reviewed in 2010), followed in 2011 by Temporal Powers (our review here).

When it was first produced, Katie Roche was compared to plays by Chekhov and hailed as a masterpiece by the Irish Independent in 1936. Chosen by the Abbey Theatre to begin its US tour in 1937, the play moves mysteriously, and not altogether convincingly.

The story of a young servant girl who marries her employer and must live with the consequences touched the hearts of the critics.

Deevy's work moves obliquely, with characters speaking around the subject rather than to it. Her plays often look at the limited horizons for women and the gentle tragedy of being trapped in disappointing marriages. In her depiction of day-to-day disappointment Deevy is a modernist. Her characters neither kill themselves nor run mad when disappointed.

But it's hard to wrap one's head fully around Katie Roche, despite luminous performances from the cast at the Mint and strong direction by Artistic Director Jonathan Bank.

The Mint's description of the play as "the story of a fiery young servant girl of uncertain parentage living a quiet life in rural Ireland, while harboring dreams of grandeur" is true, but doesn't really give a sense of how the play moves. Katie, especially as played by Wrenn Schmidt, so good as silly but loving Lizzie Brennan in Temporal Powers, and again as the saintly and sweet Julia Sagorsky in Boardwalk Empire, dreams of greatness, yes. But it's not funny, anymore than the dreams of poor Emma Bovary are in Flaubert's famous novel. What Katie seeks is nothing more than a reason to live. She'd like to be a saint, mostly because she wants greatness in her life.

Learning that her mother, Mary Halnan, was unmarried, she's dejected, then turns proud when she hears that her father came of an aristocratic family.

"I'm done with humble, I was meant to be proud!" she impulsively tells Reuben (Jamie Jackson), the holy man of the road who tells her her parentage.

When she marries Stanislaus (Patrick Fitzgerald), who is twice her age, she wants to be his inspiration, imagining that his profession of being an architect makes him great. Seeing herself treated as an annoying child, she nearly becomes one.

In Katie Roche, more than in her other works, Deevy demonstrates what can happen when characters live more in their own ideas of themselves and the world than in the world. No two characters in the play are in the same drama. The minute a door is closed someone knocks on it. People hide behind curtains. One character exists purely to enter and say suspicious things. It borders on absurd, and the dark farcical style seems a bit like John Millington Synge's Act I of his 1928 drama The Silver Tassie.

Prof. Christopher Morash, head of the Department of English at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, who has co-edited both voluems of Teresa Deevy Reclaimed (Volume Two is due out next week), told me in the lobby that the play "seems like a realist play, but it isn't." My observation is that it is subversive, leading you to think it's going to be one kind of play and becoming another. And then another, again.

The plot is fairly straightforward. Katie is a servant to Amelia Gregg (Margaret Daly). Amelia's brother Stanislaus comes unexpectedly from Dublin, and just as unexpectedly proposes. Despite an affection for Michael Maguire (Jon Fletcher), who plays the melodeon, Katie agrees. In Acts Two and Three, she learns to live with her decision, and a husband who punishes her one puny attempt to make him jealous by leaving her alone often.

Taken as the story of a young woman who makes some terrible choices, who perhaps had no real choices - when we first encounter her she's considering joining the convent, and we will learn that Michael's mother and many others in town would scorn her due to having no name - Katie Roche feels haunting. Wrenn's tears can't help but be affecting when she's bullied by her husband into leaving to begin a new life.

Yet one feels this is not quite what the author wants us to take away. Deevy, born in 1894, developed a profound deafness due to Meniere's disease when she was 20 years old. She went to the theatre to learn lip-reading, according to the Mint's program notes, and eventually became a playwright. Hailed as an impressive voice from 1930 to 1936, she had her play Wife to James Whelan rejected by the Abbey in 1937. Though she produced some revivals and some other plays throughout her life, her Abbey career ended. She died in 1963. Her dialogue feels overheard and natural. Her characters often surprise you and it's very difficult to get ahead of her plays.

It's a beautiful looking play. Martha Hally's period costumes feel just right, and Vicki R. Davis' set beautifully illuminates both the coziness of the little cottage which is what Katie knows, and its confining qualities too. Jane Shaw's sound design sets the tone of the play, opening with powerful chords that suggest grandeur, or echoing a plaintive air.

Bank keeps the action lively. As Stanislaus, Fitzgerald, with his shock of white hair and slow gestures, evokes Mortimer in The Addams Family. It's impossible to feel any real connection with him and Kaite, and hard to know why she loves him - that may be the point, though the script suggests that much of what Katie does to make him jealous is done out of panic and indeed love. There is much chemistry between her and young Maguire, affectedly played by Fletcher with a twinkle in his eye and a catch in his throat when he realizes what he's lost. Maguire clearly inhabits a love story.

Daly, as Amelia, Stanislaus' sister, shows fluttery nervousness, particularly when her old love Frank Lawlor, a blusteringly direct John O'Creagh, comes to claim her. As Reuben, Jackson projects more menace than spirituality. As Amelia and Stanislaus' nosy sister, Margaret Drybone, Fiana Toibin relishes her suspicion like a snob in an 18th Century drama.

But Wrenn as Katie shows such giddiness, quick-hearted temper and open-natured love that one is drawn into her story, though it's not clear what her story is, as Katie dips a toe into each style of story.

Maybe that's the point.

Gwen Orel runs the blog and podcast New York Irish Arts