The Ferryman, a feast of Irish storytelling in a breathtaking mix of genres, opened on Broadway seven months ago, and since then it’s gotten nine Tony nominations, best play awards from the New York Drama Critics Circle, the Outer Critics Circle, AND the Drama League…and an almost entirely new cast, the original British and Irish actors replaced largely by Americans.
See all production photos at NewYorkTheater.me
Even Laura Donnelly has left. She is the Belfast-born actress whose uncle’s disappearance, and the subsequent discovery years later of his murdered corpse, inspired playwright Jez Butterworth to write the play in the first place. Donnelly’s character Caitin Carney is now being portrayed by Holley Fain, an actress born in Kansas.
Donnelly is one of the three actors in the cast who have been nominated for Tonys; only one of them (Fionnula Flanagan) is still in the play.
Does this matter? It might in one way to those of us who saw the original cast. But to those theatergoers who have not yet had the pleasure of experiencing The Ferryman (which they have only until July 7th to do so), the play is still a rich, sweeping entertainment — epic, tragic, and cinematic.
I don’t mean that director Sam Mendes, best known as a film director, uses projection design, nor does he offer a travelogue of exotic locations (as he does in his James Bond films.) Indeed, after an ominous prologue in front of a graffiti-marred wall in an alley outside Derry, the play takes place entirely in Ron Howell’s lived-in feeling set of a living room of the old stone farmhouse in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, which serves as home for farmer Quinn Carney (Brian d’Arcy James) and his sprawling, colorful family.
Rather, The Ferryman comes closer to a movie than most plays these days in its large scale (a cast of two dozen), its vivid naturalism (there is an actual baby in the cast, as well as a live goose, and a rabbit), and its bold use of familiar storylines from crowd-pleasing genres.
The prologue establishes the first of the play’s genres, a suspenseful thriller. It is 1981, amid the Irish Troubles, when IRA chief Muldoon (Ralph Brown) and two of his henchmen summon Father Horrigan (Charles Dale, one of the few actors from the original Broadway cast.) They tell him that Seamus Carney, who had been missing for a decade, was just found buried in a bog, a bullet through his head. Using threats, Muldoon enlists the priest to make sure that one of his parishioners, Quinn Carney, makes no trouble for the IRA. Seamus was Quinn’s brother.
Why was Seamus killed? Why would Quinn make trouble? We’re hooked.
We are next taken to the farmhouse, and The Ferryman soon switches gears to become a delightful family saga. It is Harvest time, and the general hubbub features dancing, singing, jousting and joking among Quinn’s seven rambunctious children, as well as the aunts, uncles, cousins and even neighbors of the extended Carney clan. There are hilarious exchanges between Uncle Pat and Aunt Pat (Fred Applegate and Aunt McDonough) brother and sister who sling insults at one another with aplomb. All the adults have stories to tell, none more riveting than Aunt Maggie Faraway (Flanagan) who, sitting in a wheelchair in the corner and seeming near comatose, suddenly comes to life to answer questions from her eager young nieces, predicting their futures, before she tells what feel like mythic tales about lost love and old ghosts. Tom Kettle (Shuler Hensley), a feeble-minded but well-meaning handyman, brings in that goose and springs the rabbit from his pocket.
We soon understand the grimness beneath some of the comedy. Aunt Pat is such a nasty piece of work, we eventually learn, because as a child she saw her beloved older brother killed by the British. It explains her hostility towards Tom Kettle, simply because he was born in England.
It’s a testament to the extraordinary skill of both playwright and director that the play presents such distinct portraits, allowing each actor moments to shine, while still propelling the plot forward. We’re treated to a family comedy, a romance, a melodrama, a revenge drama, a lesson in Irish history and Irish politics, even a morality tale about the wages of hatred, as the story heats up and Quinn comes into increasing focus. We learn he has a past with Muldoon; he was a soldier in the Irish Republican Army, but gave it up ten years ago – right before his brother’s disappearance. His brother’s widow, Caitlin (portrayed by Fain), and her morose teenage son Oisin (Ethan Dubin) have lived with Quinn’s family ever since, to the discomfort of Quinn’s wife Mary (Emily Bergl)
In the production back in October, the cast, many of whom had been performing in the play since its run in London in 2017, was uniformly first-rate. So is most of the replacement cast. The Americans’ Irish accents sound no less authentic to me, thanks surely in large part to dialect coach Deborah Hecht; they are also just as often close to impenetrable as were those of the Irish actors. But among the most impressive in the October cast were two who were making their Broadway debuts, and who both won this year’s Theatre World Awards, given to noteworthy newcomers to the New York stage: Paddy Considine as Quinn Carney and Tom Glynn-Carney as Shane Corcoran, a cousin who has come to help out in the Harvest and partake in the Harvest Feast. Shane is a startling character, who starts off apparently fun-loving but turns strident, then drunken and dangerous, his recklessness feeding into the play’s multiply shocking (and not completely plausible) climax. Neither of their replacements quite reproduce the electricity of those performances, although Jack DiFalco as Shane comes close. As Quinn, Brian d’Arcy James, a fine actor who has done much stellar work (including the original King George in Hamilton) suffers in comparison with Considine. The character, as others describe him in the play, holds too much in, until it explodes out of him. James seems to spend as much time shouting as stewing, which undermines the ultimate explosion.
My attitude towards this shortfall in my expectation comes close to my reaction to Hamilton on Broadway upon seeing it again earlier this year. I was frankly disappointed with some of the replacement cast, but realized they didn’t have to give star performances for the show still to shine. Similarly, there’s room for a few frayed threads in a show like The Ferryman that weaves together so much, so colorfully.
The Ferryman is on stage at the Bernard Jacobs Theater (242 West 45th Street, New York, N.Y. 10036) through July 7, 2019. Tickets and details
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