In the rehearsal room of the Irishtown Players, the posters on the walls are a sampler of the company’s performance history: 20th-century classics, almost all. Brian Friel’s “Dancing at Lughnasa” is up there, of course, and Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.” Martin McDonagh’s “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” too, and Conor McPherson’s “The Weir.”
The only unfamiliar title, “The Happy Leper of Larne,” almost winks from its frame, suggesting a maudlin-cheery cousin to “The Cripple of Inishmaan.”
For the Irishtown Players — the fictional Dublin troupe at the center of Ciara Elizabeth Smyth’s new backstage comedy, “Irishtown” — “The Happy Leper” was a hit. Now some producers are bringing the company to Broadway in the author’s follow-up play. But with mere weeks until they leave for New York, the playwright, Aisling (Brenda Meaney), has gone rogue. Her just-delivered script is a contemporary legal drama about sexual assault, set in England.
To Constance (a flawlessly funny Kate Burton), the ranking company member, such a play is not Irish at all.
Poppy (Angela Reed), the play’s British director, points out that by definition it is, because Aisling is.
“Yes,” Constance allows, her voice rising theatrically, “but where are the rolling hills, where is the bar, why is everyone alive?”
The line gets a healthy laugh at Irish Repertory Theater, whose audience is steeped in the Irish canon, and whose perennial subject is identity and culture, even when those topics aren’t overt in a play. In “Irishtown,” they are central; the title, too, nods to them. Dublin’s suburban Irishtown has its roots in the 15th century, when the English forbade the Irish from living inside the city.
Directed by Nicola Murphy Dubey on a set by Colm McNally, “Irishtown” is a play about both escaping creative ghettoization and exploiting it as a shortcut to popularity. Constance and her cast mate Quin (Kevin Oliver Lynch), certainly, would much prefer to be going to Broadway in a play that let them do the kinds of Irish accents that Americans lap up.
Not that Quin has many of those in his repertoire. Told in rehearsal to use a Derry accent, he mangles it so egregiously that their Derry cast mate, Siofra (Saoirse-Monica Jackson of “Derry Girls,” making her New York stage debut), rises from her chair chest out, as if she is about to fight him.
The ideal form for “Irishtown” is probably leaner, and Aisling as written could benefit from a bit more definition. But Burton, whose last performance is on Sunday, is fascinating; Constance has all the soft malice of a tea cozy laced with poison. And when she, Siofra and Quin unleash their collective knowledge of Irish plays to devise an alternative to Aisling’s script, there is riffing galore.
One of Smyth’s own recent plays, “Lie Low,” by the way, is a contemporary piece about the trauma and pervasiveness of sexual assault. With “Irishtown,” she slyly makes the point that cultural identity can be used as a constraint, no matter its relationship to reality.
Downstairs, through a corridor lined with old Irish Rep show posters, Dubey has directed another world premiere on the small second stage: “The Black Wolfe Tone,” a solo show written and performed by Kwaku Fortune. In pajama pants, slippers and a hooded robe, he plays Kevin, a young man who notices the audience almost immediately and rationalizes our existence in a way that makes sense to his unwell mind.
“I created you,” he says, his eyes bright. “Yup.”
Kevin unspools his past aloud in this smoking area of concrete and tile, where a tree in the corner shows no signs of life. (Set and costume are by Maree Kearns.) The doors to one side lead back into the psychiatric hospital. Kevin, who has bipolar disorder, is a patient.
Developed and presented by Irish Rep and the Dublin company Fishamble, the show came from their joint Transatlantic Commissions Program.
The son of a West African mother and an Irish father, Kevin speaks Irish, sings Irish rebel songs when he’s feeling boisterous, channels Irish heroes in the midst of a manic episode: “I’m Fionn MacCumhaill, I’m Michael Collins, I’m Theobald Wolfe Tone,” he tells himself.
This is a play about mental illness, and profoundly about identity — the inheritance of it; the fracturing of it; the ugly, racist questioning of it. Like Kevin, it is as Irish as can be.
Irishtown
Through May 25 at Irish Repertory Theater, Manhattan; irishrep.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
The Black Wolfe Tone
Through June 1 at Irish Repertory Theater, Manhattan; irishrep.org. Running time: 1 hour 5 minutes.
