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Rolling Stones
Trinity takes Pockets to the pub
BY CAROLYN CLAY

Stones in His Pockets
By Marie Jones. Directed by Brian McEleney. Set by Michael McGarty. Costumes by William Lane. Lighting by John Ambrosone. Sound by Peter Sasha Hurowitz. With Fred Sullivan Jr. and Stephen Thorne. At Trinity Repertory Company through April 7.


The touring production of Stones in His Pockets that passed through Boston last year had stones in its pockets compared with the rollicking romp that’s on view at Trinity Rep. Marie Jones’s comedy takes a look at the colonization of rural Ireland by the marauding nation of Hollywood. And the eyes through which it peers are those of a couple of unemployed Irishmen hired as extras on a film filled with green hills, Celtic fiddles, and romantic blarney. Two actors play some 15 characters in the 1999 work, which won both the Olivier and London Eastern Standard Awards for Best Comedy and was nominated for a Tony. Irish thespians Seán Campion and Conleth Hill dined out on this tour de force from Belfast to London to Broadway. The somewhat lackluster touring facsimile featured Perfect Strangers star Bronson Pinchot pitting exaggerated characterizations against Tim Ruddy’s more quiet men. Now, at Trinity Rep, Brian McEleney’s pub-set staging features cabaret seating, complimentary Guinness, and two actors who appear to be having the time of their lives. Given the liberties, some of Jones’s points about nationality and class are lost. But the winking, vigorous production is exponentially more entertaining than the one that played Boston.

Fred Sullivan Jr. and Stephen Thorne enter at a jog, hop atop a makeshift stage surrounded by cabaret tables and film-set lights, introduce themselves, and banter with the crowd. They also include the audience in the pub-set scenes of the play, lounging at the tables, shouting across them, even getting a few patrons on their feet for a line dance. And as the script dictates, Sullivan and Thorne don’t play just the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of the piece, Ballycastle blow-in Charlie Conlon and local man Jake Quinn, the latter recently returned from failure in America, " on the dole and back living with the ma. " They leap among a cast of characters that ranges from the film’s battalion of assistant directors to its Ireland-infatuated American star to " the last surviving extra on The Quiet Man, " the 1952 John Wayne movie that set the standard. Thorne also plays young Sean Harkin, a disappointed, drug-addled 17-year-old whose Virginia Woolf–ish suicide gives the village pause, the filmmakers a headache, and the play its title.

Stones in His Pockets is at once an inventive send-up and an elegy for a dying culture — the same one that’s being romanticized in the film, which means £40 a day and free meals for the locals lucky enough to get hired as " background bog men. " Charlie and Jake boomerang between resenting and embracing their opportunity to dig turf while looking dispossessed as imaginary cameras roll (accompanied at Trinity by lushly cliché’d music). Charlie has a screenplay of his own in his pocket; Jake, who has an unlikely brush with the gorgeous prima donna star of the film (she’s using him for dialect research), is more in tune with being a nobody. In the end — which at Trinity is played as inspirationally as it is goofily — the two do pull themselves up by their bootstraps, envisioning a film about the film in which they, along with the cows young Sean loved and lost, are the leads.

In a director’s note, McEleney reveals that " upon first reading the play, I worried about the issue of authenticity. " Given that Stones in His Pockets contrasts actual, dead-end life in an Irish backwater with the clichés perpetuated by American movies, is an American production by definition bogus? McEleney decided that the play was as much a celebration of acting as it is a bell tolling for a moribund culture. Indeed, his production eschews, in many cases, Jones’s designations of hierarchy-setting ethnicity, letting Sullivan and Thorne run with the script. For example, the film’s reticent English director becomes, in Sullivan’s hilariously aggressive rendition, something closer to Trinity founding director Adrian Hall minus some of the Tennessee Williams.

By contrast, Sullivan’s drop-dead American leading lady is part delicate flower, part stevedore. Thorne, for his part, is amusingly gawky and consternated as the twentysomething assistant director continually flouncing at the extras to " settle, settle, settle " and spryly rickety as elderly extra Mickey. The actors’ Charlie and Jake, however, with their lilts and warts and bouts with " Joe Depresso, " are as genuine as they are showboating. Sullivan and Thorne present themselves as actors performing an audience-interactive version of Jones’s virtuoso vaudeville. But in the midst of the broad clowning and the playing fast and loose, they imbue the central supernumeraries, who are trying to swim rather than sink in a pool of Hollywood hokum floating next to a sea of despond, with enough mischief and soul to make them real.

Issue Date: March 6 - 13, 2003
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