John Patrick Shanley’s “Outside Mullingar” has been on Robert Smyth’s short list of plays that he’s wanted to stage at Lamb’s Players Theatre in Coronado “for a long time.”
The very Irish “Outside Mullingar” story, which is set in a county town in the Midland Region of Ireland, resonates on a personal level with Smyth, Lamb’s producing artistic director.
“I have dual citizenship — U.S. and Irish,” he said. “Ireland means a lot to me.”
It means a lot, as well, to his spouse, Deborah Gilmour Smyth, Lamb’s associate artistic director, whose roots are Irish and Scottish, and who recalls that when the two of them took a trip to Ireland back in the ‘90s that she “came home and literally felt homesick.”
Smyth and Gilmour Smyth should feel right at home in “Outside Mullingar,” in which they play two of the play’s four roles. Smyth is Tony Reilly, an aging farmer who knows his time is short. Gilmour Smyth is Aoife Muldoon, the widow of Tony’s neighbor Christopher and Tony’s adversary in a dispute over a strip of farmland.
The two other key figures in Shanley’s story are Tony’s shy son Anthony and Aoife’s determined daughter, Rosemary. In the Lamb’s production they are portrayed by another real-life married couple: Brian Mackey and Rachael VanWormer.
“Outside Mullingar” premiered on Broadway in 2014, 10 years after the New York debut of his better-known drama “Doubt: A Parable,” which won both the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Tony Award for Best Play in 2005.
Smyth and Gilmour Smyth are directing “Outside Mullingar” with Lamb’s Associate Artistic Director Kerry Meads.
“We all respect each other,” said Smyth of this three-person directorial undertaking. “I think it’s going to work.”
The choice of hiring married actors Mackey and VanWormer to inhabit the play’s central love story between Anthony and Rosemary (an uneasy relationship that’s blanketed in anxiety and mystery) was intentional on Smyth’s part.
“I realized at the start this (‘Mullingar’) would be a great piece for Deb and me, and who could we do it with? We decided it’d be great to do it with another married couple, which means I don’t have to have an intimacy director,” he said. “Talking as someone who’s been privileged to be married to a remarkable actor, you understand the rhythms of the other person. You trust each other. I like to celebrate people who are lucky enough to be working in the theater together.”
Smyth and Gilmour Smyth estimate that “Outside Mullingar” is the 35th production they’ve done together.
“What happens,” Gilmour Smyth said, “is that every project pulls a different part of you out a little bit. When I watch Robert there’s a consistency that he gives to the other people around. I always feel like I learn something new.”
With this project, both are learning the layers that reside in Shanley’s 2014 play that may not be evident on the surface.
“It’s an apparently simple story, but it’s really like a poem,” said Gilmour Smyth. “I love that it deals with life and death and humor, and it’s so honest. Even in the midst of the sorrow and the heaviness each of them has a sense of humor and is infected with the magic of Ireland.
“The things that really bother the four of them are odd, subtle things that they can’t really fix, but in community you can at least touch each other, and there’s a sense of family and extended family.”
For Smyth “There are a number of mysteries that I think are interesting. Most people wouldn’t think of the play that way.”
The play’s big reveal, which in part explains what has kept Anthony from committing to Rosemary, is a stunner for anyone who hasn’t seen “Outside Mullingar” before. In Smyth’s mind, Shanley built such a personal and relatable story that audiences never lose touch with the characters.
What happens to Tony, Aiothe (which is pronounced “EE-fuh”), Anthony and Rosemary are part and parcel of living.
“Sometimes,” Gilmour Smyth said, “plays or stories feel like they have to have horrible things happen to characters for you to understand their sorrow. In this one it’s not so much about plot as it is about being human.”
‘Outside Mullingar’
When: Previews Saturday through Jan. 12. Opens Jan. 13 and runs through Feb. 18. Showtimes: 2 and 7 p.m. Wednesdays; 7 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays; 2 and 7 p.m. Saturdays; 2 p.m. Sundays
Where: Lamb’s Players Theatre, 1142 Orange Ave., Coronado
Tickets: $28-$82
Phone: (619) 437-6000
Online: lambsplayers.org
Coddon is a freelance writer.
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