Play Guide: OUTSIDE MULLINGAR by Arizona Theatre Company

PLAY GUIDE

2017

2018

About ATC …………………………………………………………………………………..… 1 Introduction to the Play ………………………………………………………………………... 2 Meet the Playwright ……………………………..…………………………………………….. 2 Meet the Characters ……………………………………………….……………………..…… 3 Historical Context: Two Generations ……..……………………………………………………… 4 References in the Play ………….……………………………………………………………… 5 Geography of Ireland ………..…………………………………………………………………. 7 Glossary ……………………………………………………………………………………… 8 Discussion Questions & Activities ………………………………………………………………. 11 Outside Mullingar Play Guide by Katherine Monberg, with contributions from ATC Learning & Education staff.

SUPPORT FOR ATC’S LEARNING & EDUCATION PROGRAMMING HAS BEEN PROVIDED BY: APS

Rosemont Copper

Arizona Commission on the Arts

Stonewall Foundation

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Target

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona

The Boeing Company

City of Glendale

The Donald Pitt Family Foundation

Community Foundation for Southern Arizona

The Johnson Family Foundation, Inc.

Cox Charities

The Lovell Foundation

Downtown Tucson Partnership

The Marshall Foundation

Enterprise Holdings Foundation

The Maurice and Meta Gross Foundation

Ford Motor Company Fund

The Max and Victoria Dreyfus Foundation

Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Foundation

The Stocker Foundation

JPMorgan Chase

The WIlliam L. and Ruth T. Pendleton Memorial Fund

John and Helen Murphy Foundation

Tucson Medical Center

National Endowment for the Arts

Tucson Pima Arts Council

Phoenix Office of Arts and Culture

Wells Fargo

PICOR Charitable Foundation

ABOUT ATC Under new leadership, and now celebrating its 51st season, Arizona Theatre Company boasts the largest subscriber base of any performing arts organization in Arizona, with more than 130,000 people each year attending performances at the historic Temple of Music and Art in Tucson, and the elegant Herberger Theater Center in downtown Phoenix. Each season of carefully selected productions reflects the rich variety of world drama – from classic to contemporary plays, from musicals to new works – as audiences enjoy a rich emotional experience that can only be captured through the power of live theatre. Touching lives through the power of theatre, ATC is the preeminent professional theatre in the state of Arizona. Under the direction of Artistic Director David Ivers in partnership with Managing Director Billy Russo, ATC operates in two cities – unlike any other League of Resident Theatres (LORT) company in the country. ATC shares the passion of the theatre through a wide array of outreach programs, educational opportunities, access initiatives, and community events. Through the schools and summer programs, ATC focuses on teaching Arizona’s youth about literacy, cultural development, performing arts, specialty techniques used onstage, and opens their minds to the creative power of dramatic literature. With approximately 450 Learning & Education activities annually, ATC reaches far beyond the metropolitan areas of Tucson and Phoenix, enriching the theatre learning experience for current and future audiences. Mr. Ivers and Mr. Russo continue to work on strategic planning, creative thinking, and adventurous programming all aimed at serving the current mission:

To inspire, engage and entertain - one moment, one production and one audience at a time.

The Temple of Music and Art, the home of ATC shows in downtown

The Herberger Theater Center, ATC’s performance venue in downtown

Tucson.

Phoenix.

INTRODUCTION TO THE PLAY OUTSIDE MULLINGAR By John Patrick Shanley Directed by David Ivers *2017 Tony Award Nominee for Best Play* From the author of Doubt and Moonstruck comes this charmer of a romantic comedy set in the farmlands of Ireland. Anthony and Rosemary are two introverted Show art by Esser Design.

misfits straddling 40. Anthony is painfully shy and has spent his entire life on a cattle farm in rural Ireland. Rosemary lives right next door and is determined to have him – at all costs! She has every reason to fear romantic catastrophe. But these yearning,

Show art by Esser Design.

eccentric souls fight their way towards solid ground and some kind of happiness. Poetic, uplifting, dark, and funny, Outside Mullingar is a compassionate work about how sometimes the very things we’re looking for happen to be right in front of us the whole time.

MEET THE PLAYWRIGHT “John Patrick Shanley (Playwright) is from the Bronx. He was thrown out of St. Helena’s kindergarten. He was banned from St. Anthony’s hot lunch program for life. He was expelled from Cardinal Spellman High School. He was placed on academic probation by New York University and instructed to appear before a tribunal if he wished to return. When asked why he had been treated in this way by all these institutions, he burst into tears and said he had no idea. Then he went into the United States Marine Corps. He did fine. He’s still doing okay.” Such reads the official playwright biography of playwright John Patrick Shanley as provided by Dramatists Play Service, the publisher of Outside Mullingar. John Playwright John Patrick Shanley.

Patrick Shanley was born in 1950, the youngest of five children who were raised Irish Catholic in the Bronx. His father was a meatpacker and his mother was a secondgeneration Irish immigrant in a historical and cultural atmosphere that was known for racism and anti-intellectualism, leading Shanley to get in fights throughout his childhood, though he asserted later in life that he rarely initiated the conflict.

Shanley attended the Cardinal Spellman High School for boys, where he spent sufficient time in after-school detention for the school to request his departure within two years. Shanley completed his education at the Thomas Moore school in New Hampshire, where he first began to engage his talent for writing and poetry. After graduation, Shanley attended NYU for a single unsuccessful semester, after which he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corp. Shanley served in the Vietnam War, after which he returned to NYU and graduated as valedictorian in 1977. Shanley then began to write plays, authoring more than a half dozen works by the early 1980s and receiving his first staged production for a collection of one-acts known as Welcome to the Moon in 1982. He worked a series of jobs during his early writing career, including working as an apartment painter, bartender, and elevator operator, until he received a generous NEA grant that allowed him to focus on writing full-time. His first screenplay, Moonstruck, was filmed by director Norman Jewison and starred well-known stars Cher and Nicholas Cage, earning Shanley the 1987 Academy Award for Best Screenplay. Shanley continued to write for Hollywood over the next few years, including screenplays for the films January Man, Joe Versus the Volcano (which Shanley also directed), Alive, and Congo, a retelling of a Michael Crichton bestselling novel. Shanley also remained active in the New York theater community, writing the stage plays Italian American Reconciliation, Beggars in the House of Plenty, Kissing Christine, Missing Marisa, and Where’s My Money, which became Shanley’s first involvement with the LAByrinth Theater Company in New York. Shanley’s films and plays were not particularly successful from a critical standpoint until his 2004 play, Doubt, which opened offBroadway in November of 2004, receiving both the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play. He has currently authored more than 20 plays that have been performed around the world, and lives and writes in the Brooklyn Heights neighborhood of New York City.

MEET THE CHARACTERS

Actor John Hutton, who plays Tony

Actor Larry Bull, who plays Anthony

Actor Robynn Rodriguez, who plays

Actor Cassandra Bissell, who plays

Reilly in ATC’s production of

Aoife Muldoon in ATC’s production

Rosemary Muldoon in ATC’s

Outside Mullingar.

of Outside Mullingar.

production of Outside Mullingar.

Tony Reilly: A man of 75 or so in 2008, when the play begins. Anthony Reilly: Tony’s son, in his mid-forties and an intense dreamer. Aoife Muldoon: Tony and Anthony’s elderly neighbor, 70 years old, in somewhat bad health and mourning the recent loss of her husband, Christopher Muldoon. Rosemary Muldoon: Aoife’s daughter, in her mid-to-late 30s.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT: TWO GENERATIONS Outside Mullingar portrays the world from the perceptions and memories of two generations: those of the elderly Tony Reilly and Aoife

Muldoon, who are in their seventies during the late 2000s, and from the perspectives of their children, Anthony Reilly and Rosemary Muldoon, who are closer to 40 years old during the initial action of the play. Each generation’s respective perspective has been shaped by the different social, economic, and technological circumstances in which the characters grew up, came of age, and grew older.

The Silent Generation The older generation of Tony and Aoife – members of the Traditionalist or Silent Generation – would have been born in Ireland around 1935, just over a decade after the partition of Ireland, the Irish War of Independence, and the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 that provided for the establishment of the Irish Free State (re-established as Ireland in 1937), while Northern Ireland exercised its option to remain as part of the United Kingdom. The world was also in the midst of a global depression that laid the foundation for the rise of fascism and communism in subsequent decades. Ireland in the 1930s was an impoverished country, with the majority of the population occupying small agricultural holdings. Emigration rates were high, particularly to England and the U.S., and difficult economic and living conditions among rural farmers sparked a trend toward urbanization that continued into the 1940s. Urban conditions remained difficult, with Dublin known as the site of some of the most notorious slums in Europe, which posed ongoing social and public health challenges. Ireland remained neutral in World War II, though the nation experienced food rationing and coal shortages induced by the global conflict between the Allied and Axis powers, during which time peat production became an economic priority in Ireland. The characters in the Division of northern Ireland and

play would have grown up during the Cold War, generally agreed to have begun around 1947,

Ireland, as established by the Anglo-

and largely driven by geopolitical tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union

Irish Treaty of 1921, which was

that had repercussions throughout the world as communism and capitalism fought for global

implemented the following year.

prominence.

Generation X The younger generation of Anthony and Rosemary – members of Generation X – were born in Ireland in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Ireland in the 1960s underwent significant economic change, including the provision of free second-level education in 1968. Global economic challenges of the 1970s stagnated the Irish economy, exacerbated by a lack of foreign investment discouraged by the enthnonationalist conflict in Northern Ireland known as The Troubles that began in the late 1960s and continued into the late 1990s. Economic reform and investment from the European Community in the late 1980s spurred a high economic growth rate and mass immigration, initiating the period that came to be known as the Celtic Tiger. By the 1990s, Ireland had transitioned to a more diverse modern industrial economy and property values boomed, increasing in value by several factors of magnitude between 1993 and 2006. During this time, Ireland enacted progressively liberal social policies including the legalization of divorce and the decriminalization of homosexuality. Financial and sexual scandals within the Roman Catholic Church also paralleled a wide decline in religious practice, and a widespread decline in weekly attendance at Roman Catholic Mass. The period of prosperity known as the Celtic Tiger came to a jarring halt in National flag of the Republic of Ireland, often referred to as the Irish tricolour.

2008 with the burst of the Irish property bubble that led to the collapse of the banking system, leading to a major recession, as well as financial and political crises. The economic downturn lasted through 2013 until the

economy once again returned to a state of positive growth as of 2014, referred to by some journalists as the “Celtic Phoenix” and characterized by economic focus on services, high-tech industries, trade, industry, and investment.

REFERENCES IN THE PLAY The Celtic Tiger The Celtic Tiger is a reference to the economy of the Republic of Ireland from the mid-1990s to the late-2000s, in which rapid economic growth was fueled by foreign investment, and was interrupted by the bursting of the Irish property bubble in 2008. The end of the Celtic Tiger economy abruptly hurled the nation into a severe economic downturn, spurring high unemployment and economic recession from which the country began to emerge with positive economic growth that has been sustained since 2014.

Wild White Heather Heather grows abundantly throughout Ireland, typically blossoming with pale purple bell-shaped flowers. Occasionally, wild heather grows with white flowers, and are recognized in Irish folklore as a harbinger of good luck. The origins of the folkloric value of white heather can be traced back to Scotland, where the purple variety was said to be stained by the blood of the Picts, a Celtic tribe from the Iron Age; the white variety was left unstained and therefore considered to be lucky.

Wild white heather on the left, positioned against the

Swan Lake

more common purple variety.

Swan Lake is the name of a Tchaikovsky ballet first staged in 1895, and thought to be adapted from Russian folktale which depicts the story of Odette, a princess transformed into a swan by the curse of an evil sorcerer. Princess Odette, also known as the Swan Princess or the White Swan, is the lead ballerina, transformed into a swan by the evil Rothbart and only able to regain her human form at night; Rothbart’s spell can only be broken by a vow of eternal love. Odette’s romance with Prince Siegfried threatens to end Rothbart’s curse, so he sends his daughter, the evil witch Odile (the Black Swan), to trick Siegfried into breaking his vow of love, hence trapping Odette in her swan form forever. To escape the curse, Odette and Siegfried choose to die and drown themselves in the lake, to be reunited forever in death. The ballet’s premiere was initially considered a failure, though it continued to be performed and is now considered one of the most popular ballets of all time.

Ballerina dancing the role of Odette in Tchaikovsky’s ballet, Swan Lake.

GEOGRAPHY OF IRELAND

Cavan: The county town of County Cavan in Ireland; the name means “the hollow” in Irish. Dublin: The largest and capital city of Ireland, in the province of Leinster. Fermanagh: County Fermanagh is one of the six counties of Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom. Killucan: A village in the eastern part of County Westmeath Ireland, very near its partner village, Rathwire, and approximately 9.3 miles from Mullingar. The name of the village translates from Irish to mean “Church of Lucan”. Limerick: A city in County Limerick, Ireland, in the province of Munster, located on the River Shannon.

Mullingar: The county town of County Westmeath, Ireland. Traditionally a market town serving the large agricultural hinterland, Mullingar remains an important commercial town, and is famous for its neighboring lakes; the name means “the left-handed mill” in Irish. Westmeath: A county in Ireland, in the province of Leinster and part of the Midlands region. Wicklow: The county town of County Wicklow, and the capital of the Mid-East Region in Ireland. The name means “church of the toothless one” in Irish.

GLOSSARY Bad cess: An Irish phrase used as a type of curse, meaning “bad luck [to you].” Begrudge: To envy someone a possession or enjoyment of something, or to give something up with reluctance or resentment. Black swan: Reference to the fake Odette used to trick Prince Siegfried into marriage in the Tchaikovsky ballet Swan Lake, adapted from the Russian folktale sometimes referred to as The Swan Princess. Blockade: To seal off a place to prevent the entrance or departure of goods or people. Bog: Wet, spongy ground, especially a poorly drained area rich in accumulated plant material that is frequently surrounding a body of open water and contains characteristic flora including sedges, heaths, and sphagnum.

The open-water center of a bog.

Bollocks: A phrase used to express contempt, annoyance, or defiance, or declare something as nonsense, regarded as a vulgar expression. Boreen: A narrow country road. Cracked: Crazy or insane. Daft: Silly, foolish, or preposterous. Emigrate: To leave one’s own country to settle permanently in another. Emphysema: A condition in which the air sacs of the lungs become damaged and enlarged, causing breathlessness, and often associated with smoking. A boreen in Spiddal, County Galway, Ireland.

Ewe: A female sheep. Foist: To impose something unwelcome or unnecessary on a person.

Folly: Foolishness, or lack of good sense. Gamorrah: A city of great sin destroyed by fire and brimstone as an expression of Godâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s judgment in the Christian Bible, used as a modern metaphor for vice. Garda: The state police force of the Irish Republic. Gossoon: A lad, or a young boy. Half craft: Reference to a state of being half-finished, incomplete, or with missing pieces. Hat in hand: Phrase used to describe an attitude of humility. Heifer: A young female cow that has not borne a calf. Performer playing a hurdy-gurdy.

Hurdy-gurdy: A musical instrument with a droning sound played by turning a handle, which is typically attached to a rosined wheel which sounds series of drone strings and with keys worked by the left hand. Larceny: Theft of personal property. Limbo: The supposed abode of the souls of unbaptized infants and those who died before the coming of Christ in some Christian beliefs, representing the uncertain period spent awaiting a decision or resolution; an intermediate state or condition. Lufthansa: The largest German airline, also the largest airline in Europe in terms of fleet size when combined with its subsidiaries. Morphodite: Originally meaning a hermaphrodite, or a person having both male and female sex characteristics, the word was later used to refer to a homosexual man or woman.

A pacemaker.

North Star: The brightest star in the Ursa Minor constellation, representing due north and used to metaphorically refer to the correct or natural direction. Pacemaker: An artificial device that stimulates and regulates the contractions of the heart muscle. Pagan: A person holding religious beliefts that differ from those of the main world religions. Parcel: A thing, collections of things, an amount or quantity of something, or a package. Pontius Pilate: The fifth prefect of the Roman province of Judaea best known for lobbying for leniency and then acquiescing to the crowd, resulting in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. In the Gospel of Matthew, Pilate washes his hands to absolve himself of responsibility and to demonstrate his reluctance to participate in the guilt of Jesus.

Herod and Pontius Pilate Shake Hands, an etching by F.A. Ludy after J.F. Overbook, 1845.

Right of way: The legal right to pass along a specific route or proceed with precedence over others in a particular situation of place. Roadfront: The portion of a property that directly borders the road. Send away for: To order or request that something be sent to someone. Shortcoming: A fault or failure to meet a certain standard, usually used in reference to a person’s character, plan, or system. Slander: The action or crime of making a false spoken statement that is damaging to a person’s reputation. Smartly:, Quickly, with intelligence or skill, or in an attractively neat and stylish manner. Stamp: A pattern or mark sometimes used to represent a person’s identity. Swan Lake: Tchaikovsky ballet composed in 1875-76 that premiered to little acclaim, but remains one of the most popular ballets of all time. Turf: The grace and service layer of earth. Vengeful: Seeking to harm someone in return for a perceived injury or injustice. Wellies: Short for wellingtons, a type of knee-length waterproof rubber or plastic boot. White swan: Reference to the good, gentle, admirable Odette, the princess and tragic heroine of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake and the Russian folktale sometimes referred to as The Swan Princess.

Modern Wellington boots.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS & ACTIVITIES Discussion Questions 1. Research and read other works written by the playwright, John Patrick Shanley. How does the story of Outside Mullingar compare and contrast to some of his other stories? Can you find a similar style in his collection? 2. The characters of Outside Mullingar experience the traditions of an Irish family, the love they have, and the community that surrounds them. Research Irish culture and discuss how this production creates that world onstage. How is the world created through sound, set design, costumes, etc.? 3. Think about your own family traditions and heritage. How are your experiences different from the characters in this play? How are your experiences the same? 4. Land plays an important part in this story: it represents home, culture, identity, and love. Is there anything in your life that similarly represents who you are and where you come from? Explain and compare with your peers. 5. Which character(s) did you connect with the most, and why? 6. How do the characters change throughout the play? How did their relationships with one another change? What production elements indicate these changes to their characters? 7. Do you think the characters are better off in the end? Why or why not? Has everything been resolved?

Classroom Activities 1. Research Irish history, culture, and customs and have each student present to the class on a different topic. 2. Outside Mullingar explores themes of family and traditions. Have students write short stories based on their own family heritage and traditions. 3. In the story, the characters from two different generations share different perspectives of love and relationships. Have students create a mock debate with love as the topic. Divide the class into three teams, each of which must adopt the perspective of a different generation â&#x20AC;&#x201D; their grandparents, their parents, or themselves â&#x20AC;&#x201D; and prepare a statement about what they think love and the ideal relationship looks like. 4. The dialogue in Outside Mullingar is described as poetic prose; Ireland has a rich history of beautiful poetry. Have your students find an Irish poem that resonates with them. Students can then either perform that poem for the class, or write their own poem with a similar style and meter.