The Luck of the Irish

Play by Kirsten Greenidge

Huntington Theatre Company

The Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts
Boston, MA

Directed by Melia Bensussen

With Shalita Grant (Nessa Charles), Francesca Choy-Kee (Hannah Davis), Nikkole Salter (Lucy Taylor), Victor Williams (Rex Taylor), Marianna Bassham (Patty Ann Donovan), McCaleb Burnett (Joe Donovan),Richard McElvain (Mr. Donovan), Curtis McClarin (Rich Davis), Antione Gray Jr. (Miles Davis), Nancy E. Carroll (Mrs. Donovan)

Two time frames are interleaved in this play: the late 1950s and the early 2000s. The setting is the same house in a suburb modeled on Arlington, an almost exclusively white suburb of Boston during the earlier time frame.

Rex (Victor Williams) and Lucy (Nikkole Salter) Taylor, beginning to taste some economic success, want to move to this suburb, but, as African-Americans, they know they will not be able to buy a house there. So, they bargain with an Irish-American couple, Joe Donovan (McCaleb Burnett) and Patty Ann Donovan (Marianna Bassham), to buy the house in their own names for them. They do so, and the Taylors and their progeny continue to inhabit the house until Lucy Taylor dies.

At that point, the oddities of the orginal contractual arrangement come into relief and threaten to unsettle the Taylors’ granddaughter, Hannah Davis (Francesca Choy-Kee), and her family from that same home. Faced with the ongoing challenges of rearing an African-American child in a still dominantly white school system, Hannah is under considerable stress. The threat of losing the house compounds the stress, but also provides the possibility of moving somewhere with fewer of these sorts of problems.

Indeed, the theme of this play is urgent and interesting: the segregation of neighborhoods in the Boston area and the attempt of a few brave souls to break through and live in formerly forbidden areas. Playwright Kirsten Greenidge was inspired by the story of her own grandparents who did just that by moving to Arlington in the mid-twentieth century and arranging with a white family to act as their front.

Four or five decades ago, Boston and its environs were fraught with all kinds of boundaries built on prejudice. Though those are not by any means entirely gone, the intervening years and the efforts of those to break through the boundaries have improved the landscape considerably. The history of that change is well worth exploring.

The title of the play is, it turns out, ironic. I had the sense that the play really was about the Irish, and my guess, from looking around the audience, was that a good portion of it expected the same.

But this play is mostly about the African-American family. The role of Irish-Americans (in the characters of Joe and Patty Ann Donovan) provides a fulcrum for that central story, but is not explored closely enough to live at the core of it. That fulcrum, which carries the opposing weights of racial prejudice and class resentment, is presented persuasively enough to create the drama, but it does not reveal too much about the trajectory of the not very successful Irish-American family interwoven with the African-American one.

Some of the acting is exceptionally good. I have seen Marianna Bassham (Patty Ann Donovan) in many Actors’ Shakespeare Project productions and have always enjoyed the convincing way she renders a broad range of characters, often conveying them with a combination of empathy and wry wit. Here, her depiction of the young Mrs. Donovan hits home. And, as Mrs. Donovan forty something years later, Nancy E. Carroll brings an aging bitterness that is palpable.

Though the subject is important and the structure of the play is interestingly conceived, the writing itself is not very economical. Dialogue and action move less efficiently than they might and, as a result, the pacing suffers. But Greenidge is still a young playwright. The Luck of the Irish shows off her capacity to frame a theme of significance and create a compelling narrative structure. Hopefully, these strengths will bring along, in future endeavors, the kind of tautness and economy of rendering that can transform great inspirations into great works.

– BADMan