It's often dangerous to generalize, but I feel secure in stating that the Irish are pretty good at writing drama. The Origin Theatre Company's new evening of world-premiere one-person plays, collectively titled Spinning the Times, has done nothing to disabuse me of this happy prejudice.
Part of the Origin's 1st Irish festival, the production brings together brief new works by five female playwrights. Though the writers all hail from Ireland, it is a highly international evening, and director M. Burke Walker seems to have chosen the order of presentation with care, as one might map out a world tour.
Rosemary Jenkinson's The Lemon Tree takes place in a modern-day Belfast where violent echoes of the Troubles linger, and linger. Young Kenny likes to stir up mischief with his pals and harass the local Catholics, but he's affected more than he'd like to admit by an encounter with an American relief worker drumming up aid for Palestinians in Gaza. As embodied by the lanky, magnetic, and deadly-focused Jerzy Gwiazdowski, who dominates the stage seemingly effortlessly, Kenny is not merely a fully realized creature, but bigger than life in that believable, language-soaked Irish way. Ms. Jenkinson has the exceptional storyteller's talent of deriving large truths from small fictions. Her play is a compressed, polished marvel, practically a poem, with not a word out of place, nor, thanks to Mr. Gwiazdowski and the exquisitely skilled direction, an extraneous gesture.
From talk of Gaza, we move to the place itself, where in Lucy Caldwell's wrenching The Luthier a young Palestinian violin repairman evokes his horrific childhood. The subtle and precise sound design (by Christian Frederickson), lighting (Jonathan Spencer), and set design (Lex Liang) aid mightily, as music and rockets and the buzzing and dimming of stuttering electrical power transport us to the workshop where Dawood, partially protected from the war outside, studies his craft - and from which he slides us into the past, where as a child he lost his family and saw his friends die in an undeclared war he didn't ask for.
Ms.Caldwell illuminates moments that limn Dawood's essential humanity against the inhumanity that surrounds him: as a child, crowding around a pilfered "porno" DVD with his friends; as a young craftsman and music student, being transported by Khachaturian's "Sabre Dance"; as a physical being, lighting and snuffing the tin-can candles he must use when the power goes out. As played convincingly by Ethan Nova, Dawood spreads his mild, peaceful nature over the theater, so that when he relates violent events they strike us all the harder. Mr. Nova easily overcomes the slight handicap of not quite looking the part, brilliantly casting a soft, cold spell, then kicking us when we're down.
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