By The Bog of Cats...
Tucked away in a back-alley venue called The Piano Factory, Devanaughn Theatre makes good use of the venue’s tiny space. The convincing façade of a tiny trailer stands at one end of the room, complete with swatchs of duct tape covering a broken window and dark smudges smeared across its metal surface, while a brick wall and doorway flank the space on one side. The seats - there only about 50 - are right there amidst the action, since there is no proper stage. This allows director Rose Carlson to involve the audience as part of the process with Devanaughn Theater’s production of Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats, as the actors range out into the corners and spaces between the chairs during their performance.
Set in the Irish midlands, in and around a tiny village situated near "the bog of cats," the play updates and distills the legend of Medea, source material for the Euripides play named after the mythological figure. Medea was a witch descended from ancient gods; in ancient tales, she married the seafaring adventurer Jason (whose ship, Argos, provided the name for his crew, the Argonauts). Medea and Jason shared a powerful bond that was both outsized and dangerous; the pair left corpses in their wake as they shook up the ancient world, before eventually betraying one another (in some versions, at least).
The classical Medea was a one-woman murder squad, killing foes and family alike, sometimes as a tactical measure, sometimes for revenge. It’s no surprise, then, that By the Bog of Cats starts off with a spectral "Ghost Fancier" (Jordan Harrison, nattily attired in black formal wear) encountering the play’s version of Medea, the fey Hester Swane (Dani Duggan), in the gloaming of dawn; mistaking early morning for sunset twilight, The Ghost Fancier prematurely brings tidings of tragedy to Hester, and he’s not the last: as the day (and the play) progresses, a blind, fur-clad, mouse-devouring soothsayer called Catwoman (Liz Robbins) issues Hester a warning to leave the bog right away to avert impending tragedy, and the ghost of Hester’s murdered brother Joseph (also played by Jordan Harrison), not coincidentally, finds his way to her despite the darkness shrouding the "country of the dead."
It’s a day of import all around, because it also brings the wedding of Carthage - the play’s version of Jason - and Caroline. Carthage (Charles Hess), the father of Hester’s daughter Josie (Holly Payne-Strange and Sarah Smith alternate in the role depending on the date), has left Hester after 14 years of unmarried conjugal turbulence. Even though she characterizes their relationship as "two rocks grinding against one another," Hester clings with ferocity to her claim on Carthage, warning Caroline (Ellen Adair) to break off her wedding plans and insisting that there’s no way she’s going to vacate the house she once shared with Carthage in order to make room for her man’s new family. This is the crux of the tragedy: like any doomed character from the Greek stage tradition, it’s Hester’s own nature that sets her on a collision course with disaster and death. Only: who will she take down with her?
Dani Duggan glosses her dense, poetic dialogue with an Irish brogue delivered in a rapid, urgent cadence that sounds like an incantation. (Ms. Duggan, who served as dialogue coach to the cast, must be a native of Ireland, so faultless and fluid is her dialect.) Indeed, Duggan anchors the play and brings it an aura of eerie power; she commands the production and sets the tenor of the piece, snapping out zingy one-liners cheek-by-jowl with chilling, fearless pronouncements intimating vengeance and destruction. She’s a creature of the bog, and a familiar to black-winged swans: pity the fool who takes her warnings lightly.
That’s the Greek element of the play, cleverly embedded at the core of Carr’s script. The Irish half of the show’s DNA manifests itself in the form of Carthage’s mother, the irrepressible, vinegary Mrs. Kilbride (Ann Marie Shea), an embittered woman whose every utterance, even those meant to be loving, conceals a barb of complaint, often to hilarious effect. Shea carries off her character’s scorching dialogue with effervescence, and when the character hits her stride at the wedding banquet the mix of situational exaggeration and character authenticity works just right.
Hess’ Carthage is less a Jason-like hero than a man who struggles to free himself from the wrong path in life, and loosen the bonds of an inevitably destructive union. It’s not enough for Carthage to play his part in the grinding of two stony souls; he wishes for tenderness and peace, and his bride Caroline, whom we only ever see clad in a wedding dress, seems to promise a more placid future. But even Caroline - who envies the raw passion between Hester and Carthage - has her secrets and pangs: there’s a strong, though ot overt, whiff of filial impropriety between the bride and her overbearing father, the wealthy land-holder Xavier (Phil Thompson), whose brute-force patriarch, concerned with commerce and farmland, counterbalances the wild, feminine energy that Hester (and Catwoman) embody. When push comes to shove, the central conflict isn’t between man and common-law wife (though divorce and custody is a subtext here), but rather between the primal goddess of the earth and the human drive to captivate and exploit nature’s bounty. Xavier has steel and the threat of force to bring to the table, but Hester has more primitive, and more powerful, elements at her disposal.
It’s one thing for powerful characters to clash in a Greek drama of classical provenance, but how does a contemporary playwright set so many characters on trajectories of passion, betrayal, and ultimate tragedy without allowing affairs to devolve into soapy dramatics? Carr manages the trick by giving the characters a deep-rooted familiarity with one another. Xavier recalls Hester as a neglected infant "in a dirty nappy," left chained in the yard of a shabby trailer by Hester’s mother, a mythic figure referred to as "Big Josie" with whom Xavier seems to have shared a significant (but perhaps not consensual) relationship. Hester, in turn, speaks of a lingering affection for Caroline that originated when Caroline, as a young girl, used to idolize Hester. And the arguments between Hester and Carthage come complete with each character’s differing recollections of the fourteen years they spent as a couple, with Carthage seeing himself as Hester’s ill-used plaything and Hester declaring herself to be Carthage’s greatest benefactor.
Secondary characters round out the production: Jordan Harrison takes on a third role as a waiter (a comic bit of casting when he’s required to nip offstage for a quick-change into the ghost of Joseph Swane during an impromptu séance with Catwoman, who hears his spectral moans while lapping at a saucer of wine); Fred Robbins brings gusto to his limited stage time as Father Willow, a rural Catholic priest cut from rough-spun cloth; and where Holly Payne-Strange was wonderfully charming as daughter Josie at the performance I saw, playing the young maid against Anne Marie Shea’s crone, Jean Sheikh’s performance as motherly Monica balanced out the familiar triad. Hester’s lone defender, Monica leavens the story’s blazing resentments and festering wounds from times past with a honey-gilded touch of generosity, offering to bring the outcast Hester some wine from Carthage’s wedding celebration. (Hester accepts the offer: "It’s not the wine’s fault that it fell into the claws of cut-throats and gargoyles.")
Just as crucial to the piece are the lighting effects Greg Jutkiewicz and Zac Mouneimneh, which evoke the red rising of the sun and the ominous flickerings of a fire with shoestring creativity; the sound is top-notch, with a moody, suitably Irish musical score complete with Greek and Irish vocals, courtesy of Katie MacDonnell and Michael Haddad. Costumer Debbi Hobson has an eye for just the right attire - everything from torn and bloody rag-wool sweaters to elegant white satin ensembles grace the characters - and Rose Carlson proves her hands-on mettle by overseeing the set and sound design in addition to her effectively handled directorial duties.
By the time Hester and The Ghost Fancier reunite, long after dusk, to do an improbably cheery swing dance - a touch that will finish you off if the play’s climactic episode of bloodshed and mourning doesn’t do the trick - you feel that the spirits of both Comedy and Tragedy have visited the room and run their fingers suggestively through your hair. For such a small production, By the Bog of Cats is surprising in its emotional scope: seductive, sweeping, and bittersweet.
Playing at The Piano Factory, 791 Tremont Street (at the rear of the parking lot). Play dates: October 12 - 29, Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at 8 pm, Sunday matinees at 3 pm. Tickets: $19 / $17, available from www.theatermania.com or 1-866-811-4111. More info at www.devtheatre.com
