subject: Acting Classes Nyc Ny New York Acting Class- Theater Group [print this page] An Outlaw Chasing a Train and His Own Terrible Past
Staging a sweeping and earnest western about a larger-than-life outlaw in a small Off Broadway theater could seem to be a joke, like putting John Wayne in a puppet show. Yet if any writer could pull this off, it might be Sebastian Barry, the most overlooked of the great living Irish dramatists, whose lyrical prose, ghostly and muscular with flashes of the sublime, can sound the way the terrain of the Wild West looks.
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White Woman Street, a minor early work receiving a somber production at the Irish Repertory Theater in Chelsea, stands out in his rsum since it is set in America, with a plot that echoes a genre movies. While it follows a bandit leading a diverse band through Ohio in 1916 to rob a train, the play has similarities to Mr. Barrys previous poetic dramas, like The Steward of Christendom and Our Lady of Sligo, which focus tightly on guilt-ridden, solitary figures haunted by the past. Its a cruder play, with many flaws, but for Barry devotees, essential viewing.
Mr. Barry began writing White Woman Street as a novel, and that shows. It has more detail than drive, relying on a rather inert structure, and while it takes place outside, with five men riding horses (represented by bar stools in Charlotte Moores lean and flat staging), it seems like an interior monologue translated into a play.
Thirty years ago, not far from here, I saw the worst sight of all my days and I hit the roads of America as a simple outlaw, says Trooper (Stephen Payne, whose leathery face was made for this material). I was a different man from that time on, and my heart was a kind of hidden hill.
The writing is full of metaphors and soulful musings, but with the exception of a little repetition, its not indulgent. Mr. Payne captures the quiet heaviness that weighs on Trooper as he leads a group that includes an elderly Amish cowboy and a Russian-Chinese man from Brooklyn. His stated goal is to rob a train, but thats just a pretext to return to White Woman Street, the town with a brothel where his life suddenly changed.
There is blood in his past, and while the inevitable speech that explains his secret is not surprising nor particularly revelatory, its lovely to listen to. The words here stick in your mind, like an old country song or a terrible crime committed long ago.
White Woman Street is playing through June 27 at the Irish Repertory Theater, 132 West 22nd Street, Chelsea; (212) 727-3727, irishrep.org.
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The Western film has always been a genre that could be used to tell almost any kind of story; it has been used as a means of attacking such societal issues as McCarthyism (High Noon), lynching (The Ox-Bow Incident), and racism (Cheyenne Autumn). In Sebastian Barry's ambitious new play White Woman Street, now being a given superior production at the Irish Repertory Theatre, the playwright uses the genre to explore the more personal issue of guilt.
The work is set in 1916 Ohio, where we meet a band of five unlikely outlaws (played by Ron Crawford, Charlie Hudson III, Greg Mullavey, Gordon Stanley, and Evan Zes). The three elderly gents are Irish, Amish, and English, while the younger fellows are Black and Russian, the latter also having a Chinese mother -- and he's from Brooklyn, no less. They are led by an aging cowboy, Trooper O'Hara (Stephen Payne), who is ostensibly bringing them to a town with the unusual name of White Woman Street in order to rob a gold train.
