Theatre in Review: Safe House (Abbey Theatre/St. Ann's Warehouse)

	Kate Gilmore. Photo: Teddy Wolff

In the theatre, time can be divided into nanoseconds, each crucial to a play's success; if it overstays its welcome, the result can be unintended agony. Such thoughts occupied me when checking out the new attraction, presented in association with Irish Arts Center, at St Ann's Warehouse the other night. At the seventy-minute mark, Safe House struck me as an original and gripping piece of musical theatre, revealing a new psychological acuity in the work of playwright Enda Walsh; as it crossed the ninety-minute point, however, I was exhausted and eager to escape. Those extra twenty minutes constituted an eternity, and not a heavenly one

Safe House is a guided tour of the disordered mind and shattered heart of a young woman named Grace. (A little too on the nose, that.) We are, apparently, in Galway, where she has holed up in a space where piles of ratty furnishings are scattered about. Is it a warehouse? A storage space? A home not fully moved into? Whatever the case, Grace is profoundly alone, mic in hand, bent on delivering a concert to an audience that doesn't exist. She is, she sings, "waiting for the something, expecting nothing new/Trying to think the new thoughts, looking for the blue." The words are elliptical, but Anna Mullarkey's music lends them emotional weight. At the very least, one is intrigued.

The songs keep coming, accentuated by strange bits of business: a Eurovision broadcast in which the host announces, "Well, I have to tell you that we employed Agatha Christie to write the script for tonight," for example, and a sort of closet, laid sideways on the stage that, when opened, emits clouds of smoke. Meanwhile, Jack Phelan's video design provides countless enigmatic flashes from the past: a grim child's birthday party, a gaggle of elderly men and women sitting around perhaps a wake; a surly seducer whose presence almost seems to guarantee a rotten time. Helen Atkinson's sound system delivers the clatter of voices in a pub, a carping maternal figure, and a pleading voice on the telephone, which I took to be a spurned boyfriend, but which, according to the script, represents Grace's father. (This is one of many points specified on paper by Walsh that don't come across in the theatre.) In the rush of events and theatrical effects, it's impossible to assemble a coherent narrative in one's head; Walsh says as much in his program note although, he adds, it might be fun to try. But, at the very least, we get the strong impression of a life defined by duty, creeping squalor, low self-esteem, and the absence of joy.

Professionally speaking, there are two Enda Walshes -- the creator of bizarrely theatrical spectacles featuring characters mired in loneliness and isolation, often driven by out-of-control fantasy lives, versus the solid craftsman of musical theatre books like Once and Sing Street. Safe House could be retitled When Walshes Collide: Its premise is typical of his more personal pieces but is ameliorated, emotionally deepened, by the deployment of songs. (In some ways, it is similar to Lazarus, his collaboration with the late David Bowie.) Walsh's characters are typically given to nonstop rants that are often obscure and hard to make out. But Mullarkey's melodies have an undertow of sadness that is often hard to resist; they seize Walsh's words and parse them, making them newly accessible. For once, it's easy to enjoy the playwright's poetic gift, his ability to compress a sad, throwaway life in only a few lines. For example, Grace, channeling (I think) her mother, sings. "You always had a sad mouth/Just like your aunt who lost her head/The one who sat where you're sat/The one who cracked because she dreamt." You can practically feel a child's soul being crushed; it's little wonder that we see the child Grace hiding out, sleeping in a clothing cupboard.

Safe House provides a New York debut for the remarkable Kate Gilmore, whose Grace is a waif of steel -- tottering about in a sad birthday crown, standing up to a lighting truss that lowers in perilously, huddling for safety from forces she can't name -- yet possessed of an arresting singing voice and the ability to guard the stage like a captured fort. Her voice is alternately scathing and plaintive, a wail from some other dimension where hope goes to die. As is always the case in productions overseen by Walsh, the weirdly cluttered set design (including a roll-on toilet unit) has been effectively realized by Katie Davenport, who also designed the costumes. Adam Silverman's lighting catches Grace's often drastic mood shifts, reshaping the stage as needed. Phelan's video has the feel of real cinema; the images of Grace as a young girl are positively haunting.

Alas, Walsh, abetted by his colleagues, overplays his hand, letting Grace have her say too luxuriantly and for too long. The latter sequences are increasingly chaotic and marked by violence, especially the bit when Grace assaults herself -- Is it self-abuse? A ritual recreation of a past incident? -- reducing her face to a bloody pulp. For all its fascinations, Safe House is too long and insistent; it undermines its considerable impact -- all but destroying it -- with repetition and noise.

One way of looking at Safe House is to think of it as a transitional work providing new creative outlets for Walsh's musical theatre skills. I'm going to believe that for now; whatever is wrong with Safe House -- and that's plenty -- it may be a sign of better things to come. --David Barbour