Middle-aged Michael O’Neal (Tony Reilly) just wants a little bit of the epic in his life. He doesn’t have it in his home (Cleveland), and he definitely doesn’t have it in his career (insurance sales). Where he does have it is in the legend of his granddad, Patrick O’Neal. As Michael tells it, his ancestral hero was an IRA soldier who left County Leitrim for America, under thrilling and well-storied circumstances. Michael’s bit of the epic lies in Ireland, then, and he cleaves to it so dearly that his barely Irish wife Margaret (Janice Gardner) became “Maggie” on their very first date. But an actual visit to the hallowed isle changes the story, in local dramatist David Butler’s The Grand O’Neal, a wise human comedy about myth-making and myth-breaking, directed by Tony Reilly for the American Irish Repertory Ensemble.
There is transcendence all over the place for Michael once he and Maggie find their way to what they believe to be the ancestral O’Neal village. Michael appears on the Irish landscape in a cap and a white Irish-weave wool sweater, and excitedly consults with the deaf matron of the parish records (Maureen Butler, who also plays two other character roles) to find the very fields of his granddad. He and Maggie are brought down only briefly when that land appears to now be owned by a sharp and caustic woman with a spade (Maureen Butler again, in the most striking of her roles), who doesn’t share their sentimentality.
But the meat of Michael’s Ireland experience takes place, of course, in a nearby pub. Swooning and sighing at the authenticity of everything, Michael talks roots with barmaid Annie (a lively Susan Reilly) and big old beery Jack (the playwright, robustly), who greatly admires Maggie’s appetite for pints and so entreats her for “snuggles.”
Enter Brendan (Paul Haley), a hard, unflinching farmer, whose land (and wife) they’d encountered earlier that afternoon. Brendan is a well-conceived foil for misty, romantic Michael, and Haley gives a flinty and quite devastating portrayal of him. The farmer’s initial, instinctive animus against the Yanks flares up when Michael describes the Irishman’s farm as “quaint,” a word that reduces a real working culture to an idealized spectacle. Words, and revisionist versions of the O’Neal legend, are exchanged.
David Butler, who’s been back and forth to the green homeland many times himself, has crafted a script that is both clear-eyed and affectionate about Michael’s myths and his longing for grandeur. Knowing and witty, it fully reveals Michael’s illusions and ridiculousness, but does so without ever robbing him of dignity. On the contrary, it treats his yearnings as flawed but redeeming qualities of his humanity.
Personifying this perspective on the stage is the sympathetic but no-nonsense Maggie. She’s an important role for establishing the play’s tone toward Michael, and Gardner, in a fine performance that says a lot for her range, does a masterful job of balancing impatience and indulgence. Her portrayal is rich but appropriately understated.
And as Michael, Tony Reilly uses his deep, expressive voice beautifully to register Michael’s romantic hungers. His Michael is and eminently recognizable. He’s so familiar, in fact, that you might see more in him than that Irish-obsessed person in your own life. You might just see your own romantic self, making and telling the same old stories — a childhood landscape, your big road trip, someone who got away — as your own defining myths. AIRE’s fine production of The Grand O’Neal celebrates even as it breaks down this impulse, a human and a very common one.
The Grand O’neal | by David E Butler | Directed by Tony Reilly | Produced by the American Irish Repertory Ensemble | at the Portland Performing Arts Center’s Studio Theater | through March 25 | 207.799.5327
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Megan Grumbling: mgrumbling@hotmail.com