Philadelphia, Here I Come! – 21 March 2024

The Irish Repertory Theatre is one of the New York theatre scene’s best hidden gems. I discovered it last year, when I went to see Endgame simply because I love Beckett and, until that point, had never seen Endgame staged. Tonight I took my first foray into Brian Friel, a highly contrasting Irish writer. Where Beckett tells his stories in the silences of what is unsaid, Friel’s characters say everything until there is nothing left to be said. Yet they both end their stories with ambiguity and characters who are utterly stuck in situations where they are physically free to leave but emotionally tied to where they are. This profound characteristic of Irish writing speaks to the difficulties of living in Ireland and the culture created by them, much of which you can read about in every playbill handed out at the Irish Repertory Theatre.

Philadelphia, Here I Come! contained two versions of the main character, Gar: Gar-Public and Gar-Private, and explored the theme of the difference in what we say and what we feel and think. Gar-Public went back and forth between two stereotypically Irish ways of being: laughing without a care in the world and overloaded with feelings that could not come out properly, leaving him in a melancholy, brooding silence. Gar-Private was no less Irish, but showcased a different energy level. Underneath the darkness and uncertainty, Gar was full of stress and anxiety and a desire to connect with the world around him. A.J. Shively’s portrayal of Gar-Private had a vivacity about him that was truly remarkable– he wanted every moment to go faster. He wanted to dance and since and fast forward time, but also to rewind it and remember other moments of feeling alive. He was aware that there were depressingly few of these moments, and equally aware that he yearned for more of them.

Curiously, Gar-Private did not dictate Gar-Public’s life. Not even close. Even with all of the energy inside him, Gar-Public was inhibited. He couldn’t say what he felt. He couldn’t truly know the world around him, and there were moments where both versions of the character were stunned into silence. Shively was masterful at conveying that even in silence there are moments where our public persona stands strong and our inner self is in shambles. In this production, Michael Gottlieb’s lighting design supported this visually, at times keeping Shively apart from David McElwee (Gar-Public) and the world of the others by putting Gar-Private in a different color, and at other times Gar-Private was so well integrated into the others’ world that it was hard to believe the other characters were not seeing and interacting with this personification of Gar’s thoughts.

Ciaran O’Reilly’s direction and vision of this production were also astounding, and it felt like there wasn’t a moment wasted. I left the theatre thinking a lot about Gar’s father, who wasn’t able to properly say goodbye to his son. In Madge’s final monologue, she states that Gar’s father was just like Gar in his youth, and I found myself wondering about his father’s inner monologue. What was going on in his head that he was unable to say? Was he as defeated as he (portrayed by Ciaran O’Reilly) acted, or was there life bubbling up underneath it all? Despite not expressing them to Gar, he too had fond (constructed?) memories and emotions that he recalled toward the end about Gar’s childhood and the life he had lost to the same force of repression from needing to work really hard to have a little stake in the world. Gar had found a path out, but possibly to a different form of repression and stereotypes; there might be truth in Madge’s final statement that Gar will end up like his father– that he will lose his life and vivacity to hard work just to sustain himself until the next little thing that sustains him.

There are some emotions noticeably absent from this piece that I think are a conscious cultural awareness on Friel’s part. For one, we never see actual anger beyond micro aggressions that scare certain characters more than they should (as it seems to my modern American sensibilities). We also never see sadness expressed as anything other than strength. We see an indifference to change, which I postulate is masking a fear of it. The lads will find a way to keep going without Gar, and I wonder if they don’t show their sadness directly because they don’t want to effect his decision. Perhaps they hope that he is headed for something better, and they don’t want their feelings to inhibit that decision. Maybe Ned tells the story wrong on purpose because he wants Gar to remember that the good times weren’t really that good. In a way, this is what Gar does to deal with his feelings about losing Katie– pretends to be unaffected by her marriage so that she won’t look back.

Philadelphia, Here I Come! at the Irish Repertory Theatre is truly fantastic in its ability to evoke all of these profound cultural questions and its comfort exploring them through these juxtapositions of characters who are very much parallel existences of each other. All of the acting is highly nuanced, and the intimate space is really a wonderful way to experience a play that has you hanging on every word while also watching the painting of a bigger picture that showcases the profound disparity between how we act and everything going on in our heads and our hearts beneath it.

I did not attend this performance on a press pass.