Theatre in Review: Outside Mullingar (Manhattan Theatre Club/Samuel J. Friedman Theatre)

	Peter Maloney, Brían F. O'Byrne, Dearbhla Molloy. Photo: Joan Marcus

In Outside Mullingar, John Patrick Shanley explores the eternal contrariness of the Irish in matters of the heart, to delightful and frequently hilarious effect. Shanley has imagined a pair of adjoining farms somewhere in the Irish Midlands, each tended by an aged, widowed parent with the aid of a child who is facing middle age with little to show for it. Unlike his siblings, Anthony Reilly has stayed at home, "murdering" himself by tending the land and putting up with his father, Tony, a cranky old loose cannon loaded with bizarre observations. ("That man talked to turkeys about politics," he says of a recently deceased neighbor.) Anthony more or less accepts his grim fate -- "Some of us don't have joy," he says, "but we do what we must." -- but it's beginning to dawn on him that all his hard work may be for nothing, as Tony, who is probably isn't long for this world, is strongly considering leaving the farm to a nephew from America. Among other things, Tony calculates that the nephew is far more likely than Anthony to get married and continue the family line.

On the other side of the dividing wall is the fiercely independent Rosemary Muldoon, who has turned down any number of suitors, to the chagrin of her mother, Aoife. Rosemary is the toughest of customers -- "You see disaster where others see green fields," observes Anthony -- and she certainly isn't afraid to speak her mind. ("I hate the Bible," she says. "They should call it The Book of Awful Stories.") She is also one for holding a grudge; Anthony is stunned to hear that Rosemary hasn't forgiven him for pushing her to the ground more than three decades earlier, when he was 12 and she was six. Despite her fierce demeanor and her determined efforts at looking as dowdy as possible, it is also clear that she is still a young and desirable woman. Or, as Aoife puts it, "She's cracked. The cracked ones don't get old."

Shanley makes it crystal clear that the best possible outcome would be for Anthony and Rosemary to get together -- a resolution for which each of them secretly yearns -- but for the innumerable roadblocks in their way, including Anthony's carefully tended broken heart over another young lady, Rosemary's furious manner, and a minor dispute, over a 40-meter strip of land, that has festered between the two families for decades. The playwright gradually unravels each of these obstacles, until Anthony and Rosemary have nothing except their own cussedness to keep them apart.

Outside Mullingar reunites Shanley with the director Doug Hughes, who has a solid grasp of the script's commingling of the deeply melancholy and wickedly droll. The stage is filled with characters who pre-emptively assume the worst is about to happen, taking a kind of grim satisfaction when it does. Happiness, one fears, might come to them as a form of disappointment. Hughes has also put together a near-ideal cast. Brían F. O'Byrne captures Anthony's depression -- his idea of a conversational ice-breaker is to announce "It's a grand day to be hanging from the rope" -- without ever sacrificing his essential attractiveness and his obvious need for love. Even when forced to bare his darkest secret -- a bizarre admission that is Shanley's riskiest gambit, threatening to push the entire production into the fatally cutesy -- he remains an engaging presence. And it goes without saying that he makes a most spirited sparring partner for Debra Messing's Rosemary.

Messing is possessed of a basilisk stare so powerful that you wonder why the others don't turn into pillars of salt before your very eyes. "I've been older than all of you since I was born," she announces, before laying down the law to her elders. Commenting that Anthony's recently acquired hobby of prowling the land with a metal detector has earned the attention of his neighbors, she says, "You're becoming famous in the wrong way." And she is more than capable of warning Tony, "I will deal you a mortal blow" if he doesn't listen to what she has to say. But she also has any number of ways of hinting at the passion under that fierce gaze, especially in the final confrontation in which she all but wills Anthony into making some kind of declaration. At moments she reminds one of the feisty heroines Maureen O'Hara once played in the films of John Ford.

Peter Maloney shines as Tony, who harbors a real affection for his son, despite his cranky insistence that Anthony is a Kelly, not a Reilly -- in other words, favoring his mother's genetic line. There's a lovely moment when Tony is lying in bed, ill with emphysema, and Anthony impulsively embraces him; the way Tony's hands slowly return the gesture, tentatively holding onto his son, speaks volumes about their relationship. And Dearbhla Molloy is touching and tartly amusing as Aoife, whose very real grief over the recent loss of her husband doesn't stop her from expressing some bracingly frank opinions.

Outside Mullingar also enjoys a typically fine Manhattan Theatre Club physical production. John Lee Beatty's unparalleled ability to fit multiple sets into a smallish space is once again on display; the designer provides us with various farmhouse rooms, a bedroom, a barn, and a couple of exteriors. Working with the meticulous lighting designer Mark McCullough, he also achieves a sunny coup de théâtre in the play's final moments. McCullough also contributes a striking effect in which Anthony's shadow, stooped with worry, is glimpsed on the door of Tony's bedroom. Catherine Zuber's costumes and Fitz Patton's sound design are also first-class.

Outside Mullingar may not be the most profound play to come from Shanley's pen, but it is one of the most closely observed, both in terms of his characters' innate perversities and of the psychological climate that they inhabit. (He did something similar for another ethnic group with a much earlier play, Italian-American Reconciliation, as well as the screenplay for Moonstruck.) To be Irish is to be a walking mass of contradictions, he says, and not be deeply divided against oneself. And only an Irishman could find so much laughter in that.--David Barbour