Inside Outside Mullingar
It was six years after John Patrick Shanley won an Oscar for writing the movie Moonstruck and ten years before he would pick up a Pulitzer and a Tony for his play Doubt, that this American success story made his first trip to Ireland. In 1993, in the country kitchen of the home in County Westmeath where his father was born, he encountered boisterous family members he’d never met and had an epiphany: These are my people.
Corrib Theater’s production of Outside Mullingar, the play that came of Shanley’s Irish adventure when he was 42, opens April 2 at the Coho Theater. TICKET INFO. While it never attracted the acclaim or awards that his two best-known works did, it offers a quirky cast of characters, each offbeat in their own way, enough laughs to merit a night at the theater and the occasional existential twist.
The funny thing about that kitchen epiphany is that Shanley couldn’t understand a word he heard that day. Those he came to know as “my people” were speaking English unlike anything he ever heard growing up in the Bronx, which some consider Ireland’s 33rd county. (Or is that what they call Brooklyn?) Some questioned the true Irishness of the play's dialog. If he wrote the way his relatives were speking, Shanley argued, playgoers wouldnt understand a word the characters said.
The play inspired by his trip, Outside Mullingar, opened in New York in 2014. There are just four characters. Tony Reilly (75), his son Anthony (42), neighbor Aoife Muldoon (70) and her daughter Rosemary (36).
Mullingar, County Westmeath, Leinster Midland is located fifty miles west of Dublin and 84 miles east of Sligo.
Some of the best lines from Outside Mullingar
Anthony is a free spirit. His father Tony isn’t and calls Anthony “strange” several times.
ANTHONY: There’s the green fields, and the animals living off them. And over there, that’s us, living off the animals. And over there’s that which tends to us and lives off us. Whatever that is, it holds me here. The voice I hear in the fields wants me in the fields.
The old man is threatening to give the family farm to a nephew in America rather than his own son. He doesn’t think Anthony loves the land like he does and tells him so often.
ANTHONY: Don’t criticize me , Daddy. Some of us don’t have joy. But we do what we must. Is a man who does what he must, though he feels no pleasure, less of a man than one who’s happy?
On Anthony still being unmarried at 42.
TONY: There's no marriage in the man. He’s strange. Stranger than you know. He takes after John Kelly and that’s a fact.
(John Kelly, Anthony’s grandfather on his mother’s side, had mental issues.)
TONY: He is John Kelly all over again and that man talked to turkeys about politics.
On Rosemary being unmarried and childless.
TONY: She may yet marry a man who has a child. Or, if she jumps on it she could even squeeze one out.
It’s Rosemary who keeps Outside Mullingar from being overcome by the old Irish hokum. Here’s her takedown of Tony when she finds out he may not give the farm to Anthony, whom she loves.
TONY: He'll never be the man I am.
ROSEMARY: Well thank God for that. He's done everything for you. You’ve sat here like a king for 20 years. When was the last time you stayed up with a ewe or clipped the hedge or even killed a rat? You’re fooling no one with that captain’s hat. Anthony runs the show and you’re nothing but the dummy in the window.”
Anthony shares with her the worries making him think about takng up smoking again.
ANTHONY: It would be better than the anxiety eating me alive as it does.
ROSEMARY: – Its feelings boiling up, isn’t it?
A – Sure. I hate them. Feelings are useless.
R – It's worse in a man. I can’t stand a man with feelings.
A – A man with feelings should be put down.
R – You're right.
WARNING - From Corrib Theatre. We recommend Outside Mullingar for ages 12 and up. Outside Mullingar is a comedy and a love story, and it contains themes of rural poverty and inherited trauma.
Outside Mullingar also contains:
Mentions of suicide
Death of an elder character due to age and illness
Moderate adult language
Habitual use of tobacco
Social use of alcohol
Mullingar 1916 Monument.