Newsday's Review

Quinn Has a Neighborhood Stoop to Conquer
By Linda Winer, Staff Writer

Vigilant "Saturday Night Live" loyalists may have know Colin Quinn before last season, when the deliciously dry and nasty Norm MacDonald was noisily big-booted out of his Weekend Update slot by the head of NBC for not being funny-read fuzzy-enough.
Most of us, however, had not even heard of Quinn until he was plucked from the backround and catapulted into the unenviable position of owning MacDonald's anchor chair without appearing to have made a corporate grab for it. But somehow, in his few introductory moments, this unkown with the vaguely Irish lilt, the wary eyes and the big bowwow face managed to win us over with a dazzling, sly, deceptively genial plea to empathize with his plight. Thus the anchor chair, the show's only real constant and source of topical humore, was saved once again to keep us awake until midnight.
Now it seems we hardly knew Quinn. "An Irish Wake," his 65-minute solo play that kicked off his four-week Broadway debut at the Helen Hayes Theatre last night, is co-produced by the "SNL" creator, Lorne Michaels, and meticulously designed by Eugene Lee, the visionary responsible for developing the show's distinctive look. Unlike Jerry Seinfeld or even Gilda Radner, however, Quinn is not merely transplanting or enlarging his stand-up routine for a Broadway showcase. The only thing "An Irish Wake" has in common with Quinn's TV personal is his talent.
This is a genuine play, topically similar to John Leguizamo's growing-up-in-Jackson Heights sketches in "Freak," but theatrically and spiritually more like "A Bronx Tale," the Chazz Palminteri memory play that Robert DeNIro chose for his movie-directing debut. Quinn, who has been working on this material for more than a decade and opened a version called "Sanctifying Grace" at the Irish Arts Center in 1994, re-creates a vibrant but changing community of buddies in and around the wake of a man named Jackie Ryan, who died of something or other while the author-channeler was growing up in Park Slope.
In truth, during this brief but satisfying evening on the neighborhood stoop in Brooklyn, some audience members may have learned the exact cause of Ryan's death. I may have missed the explanation, as I sure missed a number of the lines that passed in rapid understatement through the intelligent-but not always intelligible-performance. This may be the single troublesome fallout from Quinn's antitheatrical aesthetic, or it may be the result of too much television acting. Sometimes Quinn, whose impersonations change with an admirable lack of artifice and vanity, seems to be daring us to listen haarder to his subtle, fast-talking characters. Other times, unfortunately, he seems to be merely waiting for his close-up.
The play, co-written by his comedy-club friend Lou DiMaggio and directed by Bobby Moresco, goes careening and zooming around the local color of its Irish Catholic Brooklyn cultures so confidently that we occasionally feel like visitors eavesdropping in another country. The experience is far more often exihilarating than alienating, however, and Quinn craftily uses the seven sacraments of Catholicism-baptism, confirmation, confession, etc.-as an organizing structure that reminds us where we are going and where we've been.
Quinn wears big brown pants and a green V-neck sweater, a generic shlumpy costume that changes radically with the graceful addition of a jacket or the lifting of a garden hose. His people are far from the caricatures of cuddly loquacious Irishmen, though the monologues often toy dangerously with the line that separates cliche from character.
There are laughs, sure. not to mentin caroon-brutal fathers and jokes about drinking. But there's also a darkness in these people that Quinn keeps far from the usual mawkishness-as well as a sympathy for men who were chased away for "having feelings' and came back talking sports.
There is J.T., the stoned buddy who cherishes the night a woman said she loved him and tries in vain to remember what drugs he took before she said it. There's Eddie, "the first liberal in the history of the block," who actually finds new symbolism in the death of JFK. There is Jimmy, who knows the exact hourly wage of every garbageman, and festers over every penny. And there is just one woman, a scarily dear martyr named Margaret, who recalls: "We didn't go after what we wanted. That was selfish. We went after what was left."
For all the depth and polish, this is also the sort of lovingly handmade project in which everyone credited in the program thanks everyone they ever knew. The attitude is simple. The work is defiantly not.

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