Word: caseys
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...SEAN O'CASEY...
That seems to be the case with Ireland's Abbey Theater, now returned to the U.S., at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, for the first time in 38 years and touring on to Boston and Philadelphia. The Plough and the Stars is O'Casey's second-best play; his ineffable masterwork is Juno and the Paycock. This production might well be called The Plough. It is workmanlike but never, for a moment, lyrically incandescent...
...plays Bessie Burgess with grandeur but drops the ends of her lines; Scorcha Cusack staggers a bit too much as Nora. Bill Foley, as Peter Flynn, says his lines as though reading them for the first time. Maire O'Neil, as the prostitute Rosie, makes immediate some of O'Casey's profoundest lines, his true revolutionary credo of communism--but her characterization slips occasionally into caricature. Still, Angela Newman, as Mrs. Gogan, manages to build a comprehensible and psychologically real persona, and Cyril Cusack, as Fluther Good, deftly plays on the entire keyboard of emotion, from deadpan humor to quiet...
...steadily up to the grand tragedy of the last act. Since her character is not developed from the beginning, Bessie Burgess' heroism seems to come from nowhere. Her death fails to be convincingly tragic. And in Nora's madness there are heard none of the Ophelian overtones that O'Casey's lines can convey: what appears onstage is little more than hysteria...
...Abbey players cannot act O'Casey badly; his style is second nature to them. But this production lacks freshness. Though they go through all the preparatory motions there comes no climax, no emotional catharsis. This Plough and Stars processes slowly and without stirring our hearts. Like a tired warhouse decked in its old trappings, this production holds itself proudly, but does not prance...