A Night With George By Donna O'Connor & Brenda Murphy • 1st Irish Festival 2011 • Times Square Arts Center, NYC • Through October 2, 2011)
The solo show, performed by a single actor or actress, aimed directly at the audience, comes equipped with certain predictable problems, the most obvious of which might be described as: "Why are you telling us all this?"
A Night With George, co-written by Brenda Murphy and Donna O'Connor, and performed by the latter, has another problem, which comes close to defeating the show's effectiveness as the opening production of this year's edition of 1st Irish Festival. The show started out as a production of the Brassneck Theatre Company in West Belfast, Northern Ireland, and therein lies the problem.
Despite the addition of a slyly titled, page-long "vernacular dictionary for non-Belfast people" tucked into the program at the Times Square Arts Center, where the show is playing, there's still far too much of Northern Ireland clinging to the endeavor.
The result is that a good deal of what O'Connor, a gifted but unsubtle actress, delivers, often rendered at screech level, is well beyond the comprehension of audience members unfamiliar with the argot of West Belfast.
The "vernacular dictionary," ever eager to be helpful, "translates" "ascared" as "afraid," and gives us "Ma" as "Mother" and "Da" as "Father."
The show's "George" is, of course, George Clooney, represented by a two-dimensional image of the actor, standing by "silently" through the production's 90 minutes, well-paced by director Tony Devlin.
Clooney is, O'Connor comments, "a good listener."
The venture would probably work far more efficiently if O'Connor would take it a bit easy, and try to remember she's playing a small fourth floor theater space and not a venue the size of Yankee Stadium. At a press performance, the physically ample actress actually made the theater floor shake a bit in response to the redoubtable power of her voice.
O'Connor "plays" a 48-year-old character called "Bridie," probably based partly on her own complicated life, and partly on that of her "co-writer," Brenda Murphy, whom she identifies as "a lesbian." The actress comes across as aggressive, probably too much so, but admirably earnest and open as well.
It's difficult, if not impossible, to know if the abandonment, the troubles with husband, children, career, and other areas in life, comes from her own past, from Murphy's, or from from pure invention.
"A Night With George" will have been performed 21 times by the time the "1st Irish Festival" ends on October 2. That should give actress O'Connor, not to mention her director, Tony Devlin, an experienced Belfast actor, sufficient time to rethink their production in terms of New York audiences and the cozy space in which the show is playing.
With a little work, "A Night With George" can easily be transformed into a more effective piece of theater than it is at present. Everything considered, it's well worth the effort.
