Luck of the Irish
Written by Kirsten Greenidge
Directed by Damon Kiely
Noyes Cultural Arts Center, Evanston (map)
thru Feb 23 | tickets: $30-$45 | more info
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Adept cast, director bring engaging “Luck” to the stage
Next Theatre Company presents
Luck of the Irish
Review by Lawrence Bommer
Luck of the Irish, an engaging if not engrossing Midwest premiere at Next Theatre Company, is what used to be called a “problem play.” Here a Massachusetts suburb is the setting for a look at the question of “white flight” versus peaceful integration. Full of detailed human interest, “Luck” fleshes out a social issue: Our hearts as much as heads must weigh the characters’ choices amid the greater good.
The Taylors (Mildred Marie Langford and Andre’ Teamer) , descendants of a black couple as eager for a good life as those in Raisin in the Sun, are confronted by the Donovans, the original “sellers” who suddenly claim title to the house: Now an old lady, Patty Anne Donovan (Cora Vander Broek) wants to use the backyard for a “communion” celebration for her granddaughter. (Interestingly, the Taylors remain the only black family in this affluent neighborhood.) So why not, she sputters, repossess the house from a family who for two generations thought it was their own?
Setting aside whether possession is 9/10 of the law, it’s clearly a blatant land grab by an angry matriarch who has never forgiven her amiable husband for not seizing the American dream. Instead, desperate for money for his six kids and demanding spouse, likable Mr. Donovan “fronted” for the sale from an Italian family to a well-off black one, whose husband Rex is a successful doctor and his wife Nessa highly educated and accustomed to Waterford crystal and collecting buttons. Nice folks, the Taylors don’t want to be “flies in the buttermilk,” just good citizens looking for happiness in a bigger home with a lovely garden and a great view of downtown Boston. Interestingly, here the threat of “gentrification” comes from a black family, not a yuppie entrepreneur ala Clybourne Park. (But, as tamely presented by the play, this hostile takeover is more a predicament than a crisis.)
To an unreconstructed racist like Mrs. Donovan “There is an order to things”: The Taylors must remain inferior to even shanty whites. (For her the “luck” of the Irish is really unexamined privilege.) Like the losers who can no longer despise a certain black man because he’s the President of the United States, she needs someone to loathe, if only to feel less bad about her family’s failure. So, with her holding the supposed title to the home, have the Taylors been living a lie? Must the granddaughters give up their childhood home to a family that could never afford it in the first place? (Happily, these are not rhetorical questions.)
This wake-up call of a drama about false entitlement delivers a, well, black-and-white conflict. Aware of its cut-and-dried conflict, the playwright, as well as Next’s adept director Damon Kiely, works overtime to mellow the melodrama. So in the 2000’s the Taylor descendants, sisters Lucy (Langford) and Hannah (Lily Mojekwu) and her engineer husband Rich, are divided about whether to sell the house before the Donovans can steal it, about whether their son Miles should be home-schooled rather than stereotyped as the token black athlete in the all-white school, and whether they might have been happier in a neighborhood that looked like them. (Except for the boy’s discipline problems, these are issues you’d think were worked out long before.) It would also help if we knew more about how well the Taylors have taken to their neighbors over a good half-century.
But for all the complicating nuances and ameliorating back stories presented as flashbacks, Luck of the Irish remains a morality play about who doesn’t deserve their dreams—and the answer is obvious. The outcome must echo that imperative.
That doesn’t mean it isn’t an interesting journey to vindication. Sensitive to every subtlety in a script whose plot is not, Kiely’s grand cast fully inhabit each character, persuasively presenting the behavioral differences between the Eisenhower scenes and the Obama ones. They make their luck and we deserve it.
Rating: ★★★
Luck of the Irish continues through February 23rd at Noyes Cultural Arts Center, 927 Noyes, Evanston (map), with performances Thursdays at 7:30pm, Fridays and Saturdays 8pm, Sundays 2pm (additional 4pm Saturday performances on Feb 1, 8, 15, 22). Tickets are $30-$45, and are available by phone (847-475-1875 x2) or online through PrintTixUSA.com (check for half-price tickets at Goldstar.com). More information at NextTheatre.org. (Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes, includes an intermission)
Photos by Michael Brosilow
artists
cast
Mildred Marie Langford (Lucy Taylor), André Teamer (Rex Taylor), Chris Rickett (Joe Donovan), Cora Vander Broek (Patty Anne), Walter Brody (Mr. Donovan), Margaret Kusterman (Mrs. Donovan), Lily Mojekwu (Hannah), Mesiyah Oduro-Kwarten (Miles) Lucy Sandy (Nessa), Austin Tally (Rich)
behind the scenes
Damon Kiely (director), Jacqueline and Rick Penrod (set design), Jared Gooding (lighting design), Samantha Jones (costume design), Mikhail Fiksel (sound design, original composition), Eileen Rozycki (props design), Claire Zawa (stage manager), Adam Liston (production manager), Michael Brosilow (photos)’’
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