COMING TO the Town Hall Theatre next week is a double-bill of two one-act plays by Carlow playwright Barry McKinley; Elysium Nevada and Lost City.
Elysium Nevada, which was shortlisted as best new play in The Irish Times 2010 Theatre Awards, is set in a retirement home not far from Las Vegas. Two grumpy old men sit and gaze at the desert as they reflect on their lives and times. Their dialogue is salty and richly comic, reminiscent of The Odd Couple 40 years on.
With the awakening of a mysterious woman nearby, surprising new truths are revealed giving a poignant insight into their lives and a fascinating conclusion.
Lost City is an intriguing piece by the same author. Hiram, a reclusive middle-aged Irishman, fantasises in his work-shed about being an explorer in the South American jungle, searching for and finding the lost city of the Incas, while he simultaneously plans a special revenge on his violent father who has dominated his life.
Discussing the plays over an afternoon phone-call, McKinley reveals that Elysium Nevada had a somewhat haphazard path to production.
“I wrote a number of plays a few years ago on the theme of captivity and Elysium Nevada was one of those,” he recalls. “At the time we never found the right cast for it and so I put it away and forgot about it. Then an uncle of mine who’s involved in amateur drama came across it and asked if he could do it in Carlow.
“Normally I prefer my plays to get a professional production first but as no-one else was beating down the door to have it I said he could go ahead and do it. While they were doing it Terry Byrne, who was adjudicating the amateur festival saw it and liked it and gave me a call and the next thing I knew it was going on in Bewleys with Terry directing. Then it went on to be nominated for Best New Play in The Irish Times Theatre Awards, which is very unusual for a one-act play.”
McKinley goes on to outline the play’s themes and concerns.
“It’s a dark comedy. There are three characters, though the female character remains mute for over half the play. She’s a foil for the two old men,” he says. “She’s apparently comatose but that turns out not to be the case.
“We have these two old guys sitting and talking about how good things used to be, the usual old guy chat. They’re in this low-end retirement community. The people who are supposed to be looking after them are all teenagers, just out of school, and the old guys don’t feel they’re being looked after particularly well.”
The publicity image for the play prominently features an atomic mushroom cloud.
“The play’s set on the edge of the Nevada desert, I love that region of the US, New Mexico and the desolate parts of Nevada,” McKinley says. “People who were young in the 1950s believed in this promise that science was going to deliver everything.
“The mushroom cloud might have been the downside of it but the atom was going to deliver eternal benefits. So now these guys are out in this desolate landscape and all that has proved not to be the case. One of them is also actually a scientist.”
Elysium Nevada enjoyed a successful and much-praised acclaimed run in Bewley’s in 2009 and this touring production sees it augmented by another of McKinley’s one-act plays, Lost City.
“It’s also concerned with the theme of captivity,” McKinley observes. “It’s about this guy who discovered as a child that he was handy at fixing things and he’s now in this little shed at the back of his farmhouse where he repairs junk basically. But he’s also plotting this long drawn-out revenge on a farmer who was especially cruel to him.
“It’s based on a man I came across once when I was going round the country who worked in this little shed. When he heard I was a playwright he said to me ‘I wish I could do something like that, all I can do is work with my hands, and I just hate my hands, I hate them!’
“He held up these two sort of blackened hands in front of him like a pair of claws. I always thought ‘One of these days I’m going to open a play with that image’, about a man who hates his hands. Running parallel to this he’s got this incredible dream to be an explorer and heading off for Peru, to search for the lost city of the Incas.
“Again the origins of that goes back to me having spent a little time in Peru, and hearing the story of Hiram Bingham, the first Westerner to set eyes on Machu Piccu, the lost city of the Incas.”.
Elysium Nevada and Lost City will be performed from Monday January 24 to Wednesday 26 at 8pm. Both plays are directed by Terry Byrne and the featured actors are Steve Curran, Ann Russell and Ian Blackmore. Tickets are available from the Town Hall on 091 - 569777.
