Reviewers were not invited to this sold-out site-specific production at St. Peter's Rectory in September 2009. It won the Special Jury Award as well as nominations for Best Actress, Best Director and Best Production at the 1st Irish Theatre Festival. Below are some audience responses to the play, which was directed by Kevin Kittle, and featured Clodagh Bowyer, Kris Kling, Jenna Lamia, Ray Macanally and Ryan O'Nan.
This past Friday I had the opportunity to see Barbara Hammond's new play "Beyond the Pale" at St. Peter's Rectory in Chelsea, part of the Five Week Festival of Irish Theatre in NY. Almost as soon as the play began, I realized that I had been led astray. This was not a play. This was one of those dreams that feel like a film or a palpably familiar trip to a place you've never been. This was an invited invasion into the lives of others. This was, quite simply, an experience. The play took place in an Irish Manor house in Northern Ireland and began in the back garden. We, the audience, found our places among the walkways and shrubs as the play began and moved with the cast through the first floor of the manor throughout the course of the play. We were no longer audience members, but a fog moving through the countryside of Ireland, gently oppressing the manor's inhabitants. In what I feel is a stroke of genius, the convention of the audience's close proximity to the cast mirrored the railing against a silent heaven that painfully dwelt in the play. The three main characters, Siobhan, Terry, and Declan seemed as if they were trying to escape or engage with some invisible force that hemmed them in, watched them, and never spoke. This convention also left no room for the actors to be false or distracted, or for the dialogue to be tricked up and stiff as we were no less than three feet away from them at all times. The entire creative team rose to the challenge quite successfully. It was a beautiful whisper of a play, simple and true.
This is not a review as I don't hold the title of critic, but an encouragement to see this play should it have a revival. It's sold out for the rest of the Festival, but the production, like myself, is hoping for continued life. It bloody well deserves it.
Beyond the Pale was simply, electrically brought to life in the run-down rooms and rain-wet garden of St. Peter's Rectory. I told another audience member before the show, "I've never been to a play where the audience physically moves around before!" But I did not realize what was ahead of us.
Barbara's authentically emotional, finely-tuned play gradually enveloped all of my senses. As we moved from the garden, where Siobhan and Declan's brother encounter each other so innocently, to the living room, I felt myself (and the rest of the audience, as one) become an Irish fly on an Irish wall. We are privy to the secrets that each character keeps, the wishes they profess and the dreams they hide. I found myself relating to some part of each character, as his or her physical body came within inches of my own and did things I do, like drink and play charades.
Immediately, Barbara Hammond's play establishes a modern context for the exploration of big, gripping, timeless issues-- ambition and longing, identity, aging, isolation and love. It spoke to me earnestly, but with unpredictable humor and freshness, not to mention suspense. All of these literary effects were heightened to a sweet pitch by the verisimilar staging and the life force of the actors, so that I could describe the novelty of a moving-audience play and only be scratching the surface. I was so very moved.
BEYOND THE PALE is a sensitive, sad and yet often funny exploration of our inner depths. I've seldom encountered a show that flirts so brazenly with the dark, roiling parts of the human psyche. Watching it was an exhilarating -- and challenging in the possible best way -- experience.
Barbara Hammond's recent production of BEYOND THE PALE at St. Peter's Rectory in Chelsea was a transportive, site-specific experience. We entered a church in New York City and found ourselves quickly emerged in a vacation home in Northern Ireland, populated by a cast of flawed and recognizable human beings striving for a romantic perfection that remains constantly just out of reach. These are ordinary-seeming people with ordinary-seeming lives. But to live a life of such seeming ordinariness is a major burden, and the weight of that burden eventually corrodes the pretty, simple, and wholesome picture the characters have imagined for themselves. A complicated and delicate balancing act ensues as the characters conspire to support one another's fantasies, pretending that everything is fine until they are forced to admit that it's not. In some extraordinary cases, the fantasies prove sustainable. Miraculously, lies become truth even though the characters know they are living a pretense. But in most other cases, the fantasies are just too incongruous to stand. The denial of one's true self eventually devolves into self-destructive behavior. Everyone looks the other way as long as they possibly can, but the play culminates, inescapably, at the moment when we know that every bit of romantic fantasy is about to be annihilated by the relentless force of truth. We don't get to see what happens next, but we are left with a breathless sense of dread and empathy for the characters's destinies. We realize that it's probably too late for them to fix this. The mutual self-deception has gone on for too long, and the stakes are just too high. We long to know the resolution, hopeful for a beautiful reconciliation, but we know this is unlikely. Just because one person is ready to be honest doesn't mean that the others are ready to hear the truth.
There were so many specific things in the play that I wanted tell you that I appreciated. The site-specific aspect was great. I think only a few actors could have been comfortable in such an intimate “theatre” and you were smart enough to find them. I loved your words and every interpretation that the actors gave those words. My favorites – what you can learn when you look into someone’s eyes (male and female perspectives), the morality of Siobhan (expressed in such simple, forthright words), the meaning of property/place (especially interesting because the audience kept changing “spaces”), the questions about who we are, the nuclear plant…and these are just a few.
Basically, it comes down to the fact that this is not just a story about a few interesting people…it deals with many great moral and societal issues. It is a big picture through a small lens.