Laundry & Bourbon and Lonestar Review

Irish theatre Magazine Review

Laundry & Bourbon and Lone Star
By James McClure

Cyclone Repertory Company   Lone Star directed by Peadar Donohoe; Laundry & Bourbon directed by Damian Punch & Marcus Bale.   With: Shane Casey, Shane Falvey, Caroline Hart, Paula McGlinchey, Sean McNally and Rosie O'Regan.   Half Moon Theatre   31 March - 11 April, 2009   Reviewed 8 April By Rachel Andrews

A group of friends look for meaning amidst the arid landscape of their small-town lives in this interlinked pair of one-act comedies by Louisiana writer James McClure. The women come first, drinking bourbon and folding laundry in the afternoon in the appropriately named Laundry and Bourbon; the men arrive later, trading booze and bravado in the pub in Lone Star. We are in post-Vietnam territory, and the world these men and women now live in has changed irrevocably from the brightly hued terrain of their youth, most noticeably for Roy (Shane Casey), Vietnam vet and husband of Elizabeth (Paula McGlinchey), who has yet to find a way, after the ugliness of war, of readjusting to the stretched-out mundaneness of his days on the edge of a desert in Maynard, Texas.

        Roy appears to place all of his faith in the car he drives: a pink 1959 convertible, which takes on a role in its own right in the drama and symbolises - for each of the characters - all of the wishes, desires and possibilities of youth. In the first play, Elizabeth recalls the convertible as a primary factor in her overwhelming attraction to Roy; in the second, her husband makes it one of the central facets of his existence. The other male characters, Roy’s younger brother Ray (Sean McNally) and local nerd Cletis (Shane Falvey), also invest a range of hopes and dreams in the convertible, while Elizabeth’s best-friend Hattie (Caroline Hart) believes no good will ever come of Roy until he finally gives up the car.
McClure’s work is focused on the human condition, as his characters attempt to make sense of a present sullied by disappointment and compromise, and a society that has let its young people down by engaging them in pointless war. As such, Cork-based theatre company Cyclone Repertory has chosen solid material with which to work.

Hattie, who is nicely portrayed by Hart has, for example, found a way of living with the fact that she is married to a man she does not love - and that the love of her life jilted her as a teenager - while the gossipy Amy Lee (Rosie O’Regan), who drops in unannounced to interrupt Elizabeth and Hattie’s afternoon, has done, through her marriage to wealthy town wimp Cletis (Shane Falvey), what she needed to do in order to ensure financial security in her life. Meantime, Elizabeth is quietly coping with the fact that Roy now goes on regular drinking binges, and may even be running around with other women.

        The characters’ troubles may be minor ones, the stuff of everyday, but McClure searches out the gentle drama amongst their stories. The writer is not a fatalist, however, and aside from the spiky comedy that is the cornerstone of his dialogue, these dramas are filled with a compassionate warmth and sympathy for ordinary people who are looking for ways of getting on with their ordinary lives.

What gives these plays their edge is McClure’s talent for comic dialogue, which lends the work an effervescent touch and helps to wind up the pace of both productions - in particular Laundry and Bourbon, which is on the whole adeptly directed by Marcus Bale, but does start slowly, taking time to get into gear. Although there are occasions when the writer takes things into the territory of the obvious, such as when one character tells another that he took up smoking “about 45 minutes ago”, for a large part of the drama the characters riff delightfully off each other. In the first play, it is Hattie, unglamorous and cynical, who gets to deliver the best comic lines; in the second, Roy - well-acted by Casey - and Ray - McNally also delivers a solid performance - compete for that honour, as Roy swaggeringly reflects on his Vietnamese exploits only to be regularly undermined by his doting but irreverent sibling.

Of the two plays, Laundry and Bourbon is the more subdued, yet the more insightful - the result of it being a conversation between women rather than men, and McClure does well in penetrating the different psyches of both genders - while it also suffers less from the dramatic problems inherent in the more boisterous Lone Star, directed by Peadar Donohue, which builds up a level of tension throughout the play only for it to dissipate without adequate explanation at the end. On the whole, this is steady, entertaining work from a company that is producing relevant, engaging theatre while remaining rooted in the city of Cork.

Rachel Andrews is an arts journalist and critic based in Cork.