'Falling Upward'
Summary
Ray Bradbury’s the Irish Chronicles.
Article
Around 1956, director John Huston dispatched a sci-fi scribbler and teleplay writer in his mid-thirties to Ireland to write a screenplay adapting Herman Melville’s immortal classic Moby Dick. It should be noted that the great American novel is mostly set in the South Seas, but Huston’s attachment to Ireland probably accounts for shooting much of his Moby Dick there. (And of course, the best way to travel and/or live abroad is at somebody else’s expense – preferably a movie studio’s.)
Huston had led much of Hollywood’s resistance to the gathering House Un-American Activities Committee inquisition of La-La-Land leftists and the looming blacklist exactly 60 years, and I venture to guess that this contributed to Huston’s self-imposed exile in the Emerald Isle. And with its mention of Bikini atoll – which, if memory serves, Melville does not refer to in his 1851 novel -- Huston’s Moby Dick was a comment on the Cold War, with Ahab’s (portrayed with much gusto by Gregory Peck) unholy obsession with the great white whale symbolizing nuclear testing.
In any case, Huston’s last directorial effort, his 1987 adaptation of James Joyce’s The Dead, was the final story in Joyce’s Dubliners. And the first full-length play by Ray Bradbury -- that science fiction and TV writer Huston had imported (quite against his will) to Ireland in the mid-1950s – is likewise set in the Emerald Isle. At the September 7 premiere of Falling Upward, Bradbury told a packed crowd at Theatre West near Universal City that this play grew out of his sojourn to Ireland. Calling himself “Sean O’Casey’s bastard son,” Bradbury revealed how that playwright, Oscar Wilde, the celebrated Abbey Theatre (during the 1930s the Abbey Players included a boy wonder by the name of Orson Welles) and Irish pub culture influenced him.
To Upward’s colorful cast of characters, Dubliners are city slickers. The cosmos of these boyos extends no farther than the village green of their County Kilcock township, and most of the play’s action takes place in a public house. Heeber Finn’s pub is to this play what the Mississippi River is to Huck Finn. I’ve never been to Ireland (I guess I just don’t have the luck of the Irish), but Jeff Rack’s convincing set design literally sets the stage with a convincing rendering of what I’d imagine an Emerald Isle pub looks like, down to the pheasant trophy adorning a wall. The all male cast’s singing and musical interlude preceding the curtain’s figurative rise certainly sets the mood – talk about “getting into character”! (Infinitely superior to the endless commercials ticket buyers “pay” for and are bombarded with at movie theatres. As Bradbury observed at the premiere: “Theatre is better than films. Film people want money. I don’t want money, I want love.”)
The narrator Garrity’s (Emmy and Golden Globe veteran Pat Harrington), who has been kissed by the Blarney stone, opens Falling Upward with witty, pithy observations about the foibles of his countrymen and pub-mates. There is much clever banter in brogues as the towering Finn (I kid thee not dear reader, this prototypical Irishman is actually portrayed by a TV/theatre actor named Mik (Mik Scribay) serves up foamy brewskies and the harder stuff to the boyos. There is some action involving an accident, the police and a quite clever close to the first act, as the boyos devise a hilariously brilliant scheme to consume rare vintage wines that somehow manages to fulfill the stipulations of a townsman’s curmudgeonly will.
Befitting a renowned author of sci-fi, act two seems to fall from outer space – it is almost a completely different play, albeit with many of the same characters. As the second act begins, an entourage of sissy, swishy swashbuckling tourists from Sicily descend upon County Kilcock and take up dubious residence en suite at the village inn, which I believe is called the Royal Hyperion Hotel. The multi-culti effeminate travelers clad in kaftans, dashikis and berets are led with great panache by David Snell-Orkney (theatre thespian James Horan), and seem headed on a collision course with the macho denizens of Heeber Finn’s. Like Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, Upwards features culture clash. But the wise and wizened Garrity intervenes, pointing out to the pub’s all-male bonding group the similarities between the boyos and their apparently gay visitors.
Bradbury adapted Melville’s novel featuring the harpooning of a whale named Moby Dick, while his Upward is set in a place named Kilcock. There is a heavy dose of homoeroticism in this tale brought to life by an all-male cast of more than 20 actors. Written more than 40 years ago, despite some limp-wrist, “fairy” stereotyping, Bradbury may have been way ahead of his time in tackling this subject in the Irish Chronicles.
I enjoyed the wit and wisdom, as well as its music and dancing, of Falling Upward, which is deftly directed by Tim Byron Owen. The cast is quite good, but too large to mention all of its members here, although I’d like to single out the aptly named Walter Beery as Father Leary, who -- like his pub-besotted parishioners -- enjoys imbibing.
But the Theatre West space somewhat undoes the play. The theatre was quite stuffy, and had this production taken place during L.A.’s recent heat wave, I fear the temperature would have suggested the title of Bradbury’s most famous work, Fahrenheit 451 – the temperature books melt at. In addition, some attendees at the premiere groused that it was hard to hear and follow the dialogue (rendered largely in brogues), so I suggest sitting near the front as I did in this open seating theatre, where I didn’t have this problem.
After the curtain call, a certificate of recognition by Mayor Villaraigosa was read by a Theatre West producer to Bradbury and the appreciative crowd. As it was recently the author's 87th birthday – around one year for every two seats in the theatre – the crowd sang “Happy Birthday,” and a reception featuring a sumptuous feast ensued. The wheelchair-bound Bradbury signed copies of his latest book, Now and Forever.
May you – and the public – enjoy at least another 87 years of your vivid imagination, Ray!
Falling Upward is being presented at Theatre West, 3333 Cahuenga Blvd. West, L.A., CA 90068 from September 7-16 on Fridays and Saturdays at 8:00 p.m. and Sundays at 2:00 p.m. For reservations call 323/)851-7977 or log onto www.theatrewest.org.
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