By THIRSTY
For
the second year in a row, Dot Dot Productions, in association with The Irish
Repertory Theatre, the American Irish Historical Society and Great Performances
catering, has brought James Joyce’s The
Dead back to life for the holidays in Manhattan. With a script based on Joyce’s
novella, adapted for the stage by Pulitzer Prize-winning Irish poet Paul
Muldoon and New York Times
bestselling novelist Jean Hanff Korelitz, directed by Ciarán O’Reilly, The Dead, 1904 is a
marvelous example of immersive theatre at its best where an audience of 55 moves from
room to room with the actors, listens to the music, watches the dances, dines
on a meal inspired by the menu in the novella and observes the characters in
their interactions. And, a lucky few even get a
chance to share the meal with the characters during the play’s famous dinner
scene.
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| Melissa Gilbert and Rufus Collins |
With a setting provided
by the American Irish Historical Society’s mansion on New York’s 5th
Avenue and catering provided by Great Performances, the cast, led by Melissa
Gilbert and Rufus Collins, transforms place and time in a magical way.
Stay Thirsty Magazine decided
that exploring the thoughts and observations of the three principal engines of
this theatrical experience would be insightful, and in that regard, we visited
with Rufus Collins (from the cast), Sophie Colgan (from the American Irish
Historical Society) and Executive Chef Mark Russell (from Great Performances)
to glean their perspectives of this unique production of a holiday
gathering on January 6, 1904, the Feast of the Epiphany, in the Dublin home of
two elderly sisters, Kate and Julia Morkan, and their niece, Mary Jane.
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| Terry Donnelly, Melissa Gilbert, Patricia Kilgarriff and Patti Perkins in The Dead, 1904 |
At the party are students, friends, a celebrated
tenor, a lost alcoholic and the couple, Gabriel and Gretta Conroy. Over the
course of an evening, there are conversations, music, dancing and dining. There
are speeches and disagreements – polite and impolite – and when it is all over
Gabriel learns something about his wife that changes his sense of who she is
and who they are to each other, of what it actually means to be alive, and to
be dead.
RUFUS COLLINS
STAY THIRSTY: How
did you prepare for your role as Gabriel Conroy in Dot Dot Productions’ revival
of this James Joyce story? Do you feel that you are in a way the embodiment of Joyce’s
spirit and life?
RUFUS COLLINS: I knew and loved Joyce's great novella from college (I was an English
major at Columbia) so some of the “work” was already done. The final
transcendent paragraph I knew by heart. Part of the challenge was being able to
conceive that this literary masterpiece, which was written to be read, could
be performed by a company of actors. Once we started
rehearsal it became clear that the ingenious adaptation would take care of that
and we were able to treat the material like any play.
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| Rufus Collins |
Certainly Gabriel is a
projection of Joyce himself, but perhaps not a complete one. As we know from
Joyce’s biography, and his great love for his wife Nora, his marriage did not
suffer the fate that Gabriel’s does. I believe Joyce imbued Gabriel’s
psyche with jealousies, inhibitions and self-doubt that he himself felt, but
Joyce consigned Gabriel to a sad fate—a heart that never experiences passionate
love, but one that the great writer himself did not suffer.
STAY THIRSTY: The
play’s storyline includes such broad emotions as jealousy, callowness,
insecurity and insensitivity, along with an arrogant rejection of culture. What
are your emotions like during the performance? Do you personally identify with
Gabriel’s temperament and philosophies? How difficult is it for you to maintain
character with the audience as part of the production?
RUFUS COLLINS: Many of the emotions that Gabriel experiences during the evening
of the story are described in prose in the original work, parts of which read
like melodrama in comparison to today’s literary taste (“show don’t tell” “less
is more,” etc.). Necessarily, an adaptation for the stage leaves the long
emotional internal passages (except for the last one) out of the script. Until
the end, the script contains fragments of the whole portrait that Joyce wrote.
My challenge as an actor was to bring life to those moments and link them
together to form a coherent character trying to play his “role” during an
annual family event. It is situation familiar to anyone who goes to a
yearly Thanksgiving feast or other family holiday dinner. So, yes, I certainly
was able to identify with Gabriel on that level. As far as his philosophy, I
can’t easily say that I identify with him, but I understand his realizations
about fleeting quality of existence. This is not exactly a philosophy, but it
is an outlook, an awareness of the fragility of life and inevitability of
death.
STAY THIRSTY: What
do you want the audience to take away from participating in this very intense,
immersive theatrical experience? How has the experience of immersive theatre
changed you as an actor?
RUFUS COLLINS: I don’t have clear sense of what the audience should take
away. I think we encounter art for personal reasons and extract meaning
individually. I do hope audience members share some of the emotional journey of
Greta and Gabriel Conroy’s marriage on this particular night. Universal
truths about loss and longing, memory, time, aging, life and death are revealed
in the bedroom scene especially. I hope that these revelations resonate in
a deeply personal way with our audiences.
Immersive theater removes
the “4th Wall” completely. It is the most exposed acting I’ve ever done. There
is no private space; therefore no distance between character and actor. I
hope to bring this integration of role and self into my future work.
SOPHIE COLGAN
STAY THIRSTY: What
part does the American Irish Historical Society (AIHS) mansion play in this
revival of The Dead, 1904?
SOPHIE COLGAN: The Society’s mansion plays a central
role in the production which recreates the Misses Morkan’s holiday party in 1904
because the Society’s unique Beaux-Arts interior allows the audience to be
transported to that earlier time.
As the New
York Times review of the play stated, “Unless you glide among the upper
echelons of New York society, you are not likely to attend a holiday gathering
in a more sumptuous setting this season.”
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| Sophie Colgan |
STAY THIRSTY: The
AIHS moved into its 5th Avenue headquarters in 1940, but the
building was built in 1900 and reflects the unmodified grandeur of American
Beaux-Arts architecture. How does this period setting enhance the emotional
experience for the audience during this production?
SOPHIE COLGAN: For the audience to experience and
participate in the evenings performance within the setting contemporary with
Joyce’s story creates an effect that would not be accessible in a theatrical
stage set.
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| American Irish Historical Society Mansion - Main Room (Second Floor) |
STAY THIRSTY: What
one element of the building is the most influential to this theatrical
production success?
SOPHIE COLGAN: The Society’s crystal chandelier and
wall sconces cast a warm and glittering light over the evening’s festivities.
MARK RUSSELL
STAY THIRSTY: Since
this production of The Dead, 1904 includes not only food and drink for
the characters, during the running of the play, but also for the audience, how
did you develop the menu for this event and strategize the service details of
the meal?
MARK RUSSELL: We started with James Joyce’s description of the meal in The Dead using it as a guide to
developing a menu that would appeal to 21st century tastes
and could be served within the logistical constraints
of the production. The former translated to making certain changes in the
actual dishes presented, most notably with regard to the goose that Gabriel
carves for the dinner party. Goose is not something with which most
Americans are familiar and the first experience with it should not be in the
middle of an immersive theatrical production! You have to grow up eating
goose to appreciate it. So we substituted turkey.
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| Mark Russell |
Dealing with the show’s
logistics, meant condensing the menu somewhat and designing it for family style
service that could be orchestrated to fit within a very tight schedule so as
not to disrupt the flow of the play. It may be worth noting that, true to
Joyce’s description, ham was part of the menu last year; however we saw too
much of it coming back to the kitchen – yes there is a kitchen at the society
where we prepare the meal for each show. To avoid such waste we cut the
ham from the menu for 2017.
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| The Dead, 1904 - Main Course Service |
STAY THIRSTY: Did you want the audience to experience the flavors, tastes and aromas
of the 1904 period in Dublin? How was the Irish palate of that era the same and
different from the palate of today?
MARK RUSSELL: Absolutely,
our goal was for the food to be in keeping with the vision of the entire
production, which transports the audience to another time and
place. That’s why we tried to be as true to Joyce’s description of the
meal as possible. It required some research, particularly with regard to the
“floury potatoes” he referenced. Quite frankly, I wasn’t certain what that
meant; there are certain varieties of potatoes which are considered more
“floury,” than others, but it didn’t make sense that Joyce was talking about a
certain kind of potato … he was talking about a dish, a potato
preparation. After consulting treatises and cookbooks dedicated to
Victorian /Edwardian Irish gastronomy, it because clear the term referred to
potatoes that are boiled in their skins until they burst open. So the mashed
potatoes served at The Dead, 1904 are
made from potatoes cooked that way.
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| The Dead, 1904 - Main Course |
I’m not sure I’m
qualified to speak to the Irish palate today as opposed to that of more than
100 years ago. I can tell state that Dublin has become one of the world’s
culinary capitals with multiple Michelin-starred restaurants serving cutting
edge cuisine. However, just as it is in this country, such food is not the
everyday experience of the vast majority of Irish palates. Actually, the more I
think about it, I believe it’s safe to say that, while today’s Irish palate is
likely somewhat more sophisticated, more globally influenced than it would have
been in 1904, a fundamental appreciation of fresh ingredients, simply prepared
to bring out their natural flavors, remains the same.
STAY THIRSTY: What particular part of the menu stands out as the most memorable?
What part conveys the greatest connection to the immersive aspect of the play
and makes the greatest connection for the audience?
MARK RUSSELL: The sauces accompanying the beef and the turkey; glazing the beef with
fig. They address the flavors Joyce described in his story. And
there’s the nod to the floury potatoes. The meal as a whole has an old-style,
very comforting persona that I think has a soothing, relaxing effect on
audiences, enhancing the immersive experience. We’re always hearing that
people forget they’re part of an audience, feeling like they are actual guests
at the sisters’ dinner party.
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| Melissa Gilbert and Rufus Collins in The Dead, 1904 |
The Dot Dot production of
The Dead, 1904 runs through January
7, 2018.
(Photography credit:
Carol Rosegg)
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