of no importance

Last night, we went to Vokes, one of our favorite local theaters to see Terrence McNally's "A Man of No Importance." It's a musical about a single, middle-aged fading man, Alfie, a bus conductor living in Dublin during the repressed 1960s. He lives with his spinster sister who cannot marry the man she loves until Alfie weds and has a woman to look after him. Alfie feeds his dying soul by reading books, cooking, reading aloud to his bus passengers, and running an amateur theater group, a truly awful theater group, if I might say so.

One day a beautiful young woman appears on the bus. Alfie takes to her and decides that she shall be the princess in the next, soon-to-be-controversial play that he puts on. His sister becomes very excited about this young woman and schemes to marry her brother off at long last. Of course, Alfie is dreaming of love, but certainly not to a young woman, beautiful though she may be, nor is the young woman dreaming of marrying him -- she also loves another.

Alfie, of course, is an Oscar Wilde scholar. The young woman is in an early pregnancy with a helping of unrequited love, and the object of Alfie's affections is straight and is engaged in an extra-marital affair with one of the upstanding church ladies.

Many small setbacks ensue, the kind that seem enormous at the time, all set to the background of lovely, haunting Irish music and ballads. And just when you think the whole play is about to end in the shit-pile typical of modern Irish play endings -- the kind that leave you hurting for days -- rays of sunshine emerge, Alfie learns who his true friends are, and the show, or some show at least, goes on.

There was a lot of humor mixed in with the tragedy. The director did not choose the most obvious leading man to play Alfie; instead, he chose someone relatively unknown to Vokes audiences, and a great choice he made. Without any costume changes from beginning to end, the lead actor's entire posture and face changed throughout the play, so that afterwards, I realized I never really saw his eyes until the tail end of the play.

I know we have a lot of talent available in New England, even in amateur theater, but wow, the voices were great, the music was well played, and the acting was convincing and moving. It doesn't hurt that I love the author's works and the director is one of my favorites too.

Even though I've revealed a bit about the trajectory of the play, I haven't let on too much about the plot, and the devil, or perhaps the delight, really is in the details. If you're in the area and have a free evening, I highly recommend seeing the play. (For once, we did not see it during the last week of its run -- we changed our night to accommodate my goofy work schedule.)