"An Irish Wake"
as reviewed by The New York Times

'An Irish Wake': Brooklyn's Irish — A Clear-Eyed Toast
PETER MARKS
08/28/98
With the cruel relish of a bleak Irish wit, Colin Quinn recalls for us the
peculiar narrow-minded characters of his Brooklyn youth: J. T., the scornful
druggie; Aidan, the venomous alcoholic; Margaret, the perpetual martyr;
Jimmy, the judgmental do-nothing. Yet for all the dark and finely drawn
characters he introduces in the course of his one-man show, the most
surprising character on the stage of the Helen Hayes Theater is Mr. Quinn
himself.

Given his prominent television comedy job, as the new anchor of "Weekend
Update" on "Saturday Night Live," you might have assumed that "Colin Quinn:
An Irish Wake," which opened last night, would be a satirical spinoff of his
late-night showcase. But if you were expecting a standup comic, a
Seinfeldesque brush with Broadway, fuhgeddaboutit. What you get in Mr. Quinn
instead is an honest-to-goodness seanachai.
A who? A seanachai, which is pronounced SHAWN-uh-kee: an Irish storyteller,
a weaver of legends. At the foot of a set of steps, designed by Eugene Lee
to resemble the stoops of Park Slope, Mr. Quinn spends a little more than an
hour recreating the twisted universe of his late adolescence and invoking
the small-town voices that echo on the insular blocks of the big city. He
seems relieved to have blasted out of that universe, because the voices are
harsh; there is not a scintilla of sentimentality in Mr. Quinn's admirably
brutal, mostly unlovable portraits. But they certainly sound authentic, to
the point where sections of "An Irish Wake" feel like documentary outtakes.
The strength of "An Irish Wake," which Mr. Quinn wrote with Lou DiMaggio,
and which is directed by Bobby Moresco, is in its specificity and literacy.
The vehemence of Aidan's attack on a boy who fails to bring him a proper
Scotch and soda ("The little pimple-faced Judas has sold me out for 30
pieces of silver," Mr. Quinn declares in an Irish accent), the
self-abnegating response of Margaret when a mourner stomps on her foot —
"No, it's O.K., honey, I'll offer it up" — indicate a highly developed
ear for the ironically funny detail, a pleasing awareness of the magnetic
appeal of precision in language. He's a tale-spinner who chooses his words
with the utmost care.
Still, there's the persistent sense of an assignment unfinished about "Colin
Quinn: An Irish Wake," and it has more to do with Mr. Quinn the performer
than the writer. Unlike other soloists who speak in multiple voices, like
John Leguizamo and Anna Deavere Smith, Mr. Quinn is no chameleon. As is
apparent in the roles he gets on "Saturday Night Live," he usually plays
Colin Quinn. That's not a knock. He's extremely funny; his smart-alecky
"Weekend Update" spots have reinvigorated that hoary feature. Although he
makes no claim on the stage of the Helen Hayes to be an impressionist —
roundish and impish, he charts a neutral performance course in conjuring his
neighborhood cronies, relying on subtler cues in the text to make the people
come alive — a bit of the mimic's craft here would not be amiss.
The trouble is, his characters are all specific in the same ways; it's
difficult, at times, to figure out where one person begins and another ends.
And the 39-year-old Mr. Quinn, who is a genial but not especially warm
presence, makes the dangerous assumption that you arrive at the theater
well-versed in the kinds of people and situations he knows so well; his
shorthand discussions of the seven sacraments, around which he structures
the stories, will mystify many a non-Roman Catholic. He provides so little
context in this piece, in fact, it's as if you had been invited to a
friend's office party, where everyone is telling jokes about people you've
never heard of. You want to laugh with them, but mostly what you feel is
left out.
The monologue is set on a day in 1976, when a beloved veteran of the
neighborhood, Jackie Ryan, has died, and the community gathers for his wake.
One by one, Mr. Quinn sizes up the working-class Irish characters who made
up his world. The respect he pays them is that the portraits are
unvarnished. These are people who fall easily into black moods, who complain
and curse with equal fluency, who view love as a bitter pill and a life's
progress as falling naturally into the regulatory path of the Catholic
Church.
"Here you had a group of people who had spent their whole lives doing what
they were told, kept their mouths shut, beaten by the nuns and told that sex
was bad," one of the characters explains. "Then 20 years later, when our
marriages were filled with silence, violence and bad sex, we blamed each
other."
Mr. Quinn's people are ferociously devoted to their narrow ways; they are
fatalistic and terribly hard on one another. And they're brawlers who lash
out madly at ideas that frighten them. At Jackie's wake, his pal Jimmy
notes, "There was the sober Jackie, who played stickball with the
neighborhood kids, and there was the Jackie three beers later who chased an
Econoline van with a broken-off car antenna, because he thought he saw a
peace sign on the window."
The storyteller is not a benign presence. The stories he selects do not
portray these people in the most favorable light. They are a carelessly
nasty crew. Aidan hisses "Whore!" at the boy who serves him the wrong drink;
J. T. has sex on the grave of his grandmother. What binds these souls is a
duty to religion, a sneering mistrust of the rest of the world and a sense
that the way things are is just the way things are. These are small stories
about small people, and they get a bit swallowed up on a Broadway stage.
Perhaps in more intimate surroundings, the clear-eyed Mr. Quinn's tormented
characters would cast bigger shadows.