Joan Marcus Photo
Platt and Conroy as Malachy and Frank McCourt.
Actor Jalrath Conroy took a bite of his turkey club and a sip of his chardonnay. “God is good,” he intoned, “but the Devil himself isn’t too bad.”
The old Irish saying applies to conditions so bleak and unremediated that all you can do is laugh, and achingly.
“It covers both sides,” he added.
Conroy was describing the Irish sense of humorat the heart of A Couple of Blaguards, the two-hander autobiographical play in which he stars with Howard Platt.
The play is by and about Frank McCourt and his brother Malachy and their journey from impoverished Schoolhouse Lane in Limerick to making it in America.
Conroy began doing the piece in 1995 in Manhattan before its authors hit it big with, respectively, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Angela’s Ashes and A Monk Swimming.
The memory play runs at Long Wharf’s Stage II from May 21 to June 2.
The Independent sat down at Brazi’s with Conroy, who plays Frank McCourt, to see what makes Irish people laugh, at least in the theater.
First off, he said that it’s important to know what the distinctly Irish “blaguard” is.
“Most people don’t know what it is, but the Irish do, because most of them are,” he said.
Then he attempted definition: “It’s a harmless ruffian, a mischief maker, a bit of rogue.”
Would it be the equivalent of the American “good ole boy?”
Conroy demurred. That sounded too privileged, too clubby, too elite to qualify.
What about alcohol? Was that a required characteristic for blaguard-hood?
“You can be a blaguard without alcohol,” he said, but it helpes.
The actor with turkey club and chardonnay.
The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art-trained Conroy recently received rave reviews for his smallish role as the gravedigger in Paul Giammati’s Hamlet at the Yale Rep; in this play he is in effect Hamlet, that is on the stage all the time.
Some of the humor comes, of course, from the momentum, songs, and from the rapid-fire, fast-paced careening of the story, a kind of non-stop charm bracelet of recollections.
Yet many of those on the surface at least are just this shy of horrible, gross, vulgar, and certainly profane enough for the nuns to blush. For example, after Frank’s first communion, he has a giant communion breakfast like a true Catholic and proceeds to throw it up, along with, of course, you know what:
FRANK: The food churned in my stomach. I ran to her backyard and I threw it all up. Out she came.
MALACHY: Look what he did. Thrun up his First Communion breakfast. Thrun up the body and blood of Jesus. I have God in me backyard. Oh what am I going to do?
There proceeds an extensive debate about how the grandmother can clean up such a mess. Tap water? Holy water? In the end, the priest who’s being pestered finally says, “She can pass her own water for all I care. Just tell her stop bothering me.”
Earlier in the play, when the scene in Limerick’s impoverished Schoolhouse Lane is being set, the lack of sanitation is appalling. But the way it, er, comes out, is that young Frank and Malachy’s story-telling-under-all-conditions dad regales them at how over the years each family’s crap bucket has a distinctive odor he can identify as it is carried by.
It concludes with: “My father said the stink from Bawnie’s bucket was cosmic. You could hang your hat on that stink. He said if Winston Churchill had any sense he’d send Bawnie and her bucket over to that war in France, make sure the wind was blowing in the right direction. . . She’d wipe out the whole German army.”
“The depth is there in the humor, ” Conroy said.
“While we’re laughing, we’re laughing at a sad situation, urban poverty.” He himself grew up not in Limerick but Galway, two counties north of Limerick and on a farm miles outside of the small town of Tuam.
“Rural poverty may not be as bad; you [at least] can grow a vegetable.
“Directors sometimes [he brought up New Haven-native Thornton Wilder‘s Our Town] impose stuff on text they don’t understand. If they get out of the way, it’ll emerge,” he added.
He praised the McCourt text, where the story is told, the joke laid out, and no editorializing or sermonizing beyond what comes naturally to an exasperated Jesuit. Well done enough, the laughter will out.
“I think everything is humorous to the Irish. The Irish will make jokes about almost anything, black humor. It’s so dark you have to laugh,” he said.
Then Conroy went back down to the Long Wharf to run lines with Howard Platt. Platt also directs.