"You're a little girl and you see the movies and maybe you talk to your mother and you definitely talk to your friends and then you know, right? So you go ahead and you do love. And somethin' a what somebody told you inna movie or in your ear is what love is. And where the [!!#*!!] are you then, that's what I want to know? Where the [. . .] are you when you've done love, and you can point to love, and you can name it, and love is the same as gravity the same as everything else, and everything else is a totally dead [. . .] issue?"
John Patrick Shanley, Savage in Limbo
On the weekend of November 1st, catch Savage in Limbo, written by playwright John Patrick Shanley. With an Irish ear for the inherent poetry of his native Bronx, New York, and a paradoxically romantic yearning beneath his hard-edged dialogue, the playwright shines a penetrating light on our common fears and hopes. Five characters in a little Bronx bar, called Scales (a k a . . . yes, you guessed it), each grappling with the chains of his/her little life, thinking "I don't know what to do to be the one person that somewhere inside I wanna be. I don't know nothin' but the one thing: I gotta move. And you, too. This whole world I'm in's gotta break up an move."
On the second weekend of November 8th, catch quite a different quintet of Shanley's dynamic characters the knife-thrower Omar and Fifi his wife the tightrope walker, Austin an unemployed actor, Gregory the grease-ball and Jill the . . . villain, in The Big Funk.
With mature subject material, and liberally laced with course language, these plays are not for the faint-of-heart, nor for the very young (the suggested minimum age of admittance is sixteen years). For the stalwart theatre-goer, though, this two-step journey through longing toward the light is sure to yield unexpected rewards.
"Who am I? This is a courageous question. As a writer and as a man I am involved in one central struggle to discover and accept who I am. I believe all fear has its root in denial. I have, at one time or another, denied everything. Every fact of my specific self. My parents, my Bronx origin, my Americanness, my Irishness, my appetites, my mortality, my need for love and acceptance, my jealousy, my violence, my anger. . . . All the really exciting things possible in the course of a lifetime require a little more courage than we currently have. A deep breath and a leap." J. P. S.
Deftly portrayed, with the refreshing vitality of youth, by the Tir-na-nOg Repertory Company (the Theatre School's young adult alumni). Take the leap.!Further information at: www.tirnanogtheatreschool.org
