New Irish play grapples with scandal in Catholic Church

Irish theatre tends to focus on tragedy, and Irish history has never run out of possibilities to offer. In The Lepers of Baile Baiste, Irish playwright Ronan Noone dares to expose the scandals in the Irish Catholic community _ similar to those in our own country.

As in the American Catholic community, the sex scandals presently being investigated in the Irish Catholic Church have shocked playwrights, as well as citizens into focusing on how the scandals affect individuals. If you have a predilection for Irish culture, Church politics, or the scandals themselves, The Lepers of Baile Baiste, now playing at the Boston Center for the Arts, is a chilling revelation not to be missed.

Like most famous Irish plays, Lepers covers tragedy with gentle sensitivity, intertwining the coarse politics and drinking culture with the relentless mirth and spoken wit particular to the Irish tongue. Consequently, these plays, while perhaps providing a window into the day-to-day lives of the characters' real-life counterparts, tend to lack in plot and character development. In contrast, however, Lepers features a well-developed plot and three-dimensional characters.

Lepers takes place almost entirely in a pub, and consists of five or so regulars bickering back and forth with the bartender. The first act is a common portrayal of lower-class Irishmen. These men are low on money but, high on wit and their ability to dig up dirt on each other. They have clearly known each other for their whole lives, and each knows how to get the others' goats with the ease and eloquence of Oscar Wilde, and by the end of the first act we are absorbed into the pulsing, sometimes grating rhythm of their banter.

The sound of rain falling on the roof of the pub is steady throughout the play. We may viscerally sense impending danger of some sort but, like an unsuspecting public, we are given evidence of nothing but the hundreds of epithets these educated men have gained in school. In the second act, however, the truth rears its ugly head.

These men share something much graver than the usual pains and strains of Irish Catholic school. Each was molested by the clergy, some more severely than others.

Every character in this play from the well-meaning bartender, Patrick Casey, to the sanctimonious but visibly desperate Father John Gannon, has an equally distinct and believable Irish character. Unlike in many Irish plays, however, these characters develop. We watch what starts as innocuous male-to-male chiding gradually gain momentum to become violent, tumultuous, and even fatal.

In a town where one citizen's business is unquestionably the business of everybody else, Church-defined statutes of propriety form the backbone of social conduct. The Church draws the line on where outrageous humor becomes sacrilegious, and outing the very men whom the town trusts to set these statutes is, to these men, like stealing God from the church.

As a brilliant touch of irony that could only come from Ireland, Noone has one of the characters repeatedly steal various small statues of the holy figures from the Church. These statues, like the five male victims, take refuge in the pub. The humor was not lost on its American audience; this play walks the thin line between authentic ethnic feel and foreign palatability.

The accents do take some getting used to. I was greatly aided, however, by the distinct gait and set of mannerisms each actor developed for his character. Particularly compelling was Josef Hanson's performance as Peter "Clown" Quinn, a timid, more fragile man whom the others suspect to be a closet homosexual.

I was not as won over by John Morgan's performance as Father John Gannon, whose character was rather one-dimensional. He had me despising him early on with his vehement desperation to keep the community victims silent, but that made the scandals themselves to easy to understand.

The hardest aspect of the Church scandals seems to be a loss of trust for clergymen who have been so greatly revered and loved for so long and, as an audience member, I would have liked to experience this betrayal. Noone unfortunately came to our mercy by allowing us to hate him from start to finish.

Nonetheless, The Lepers of Baile Baiste is evident of a new kind of Irish play. By tackling present issues in Ireland while maintaining a traditional standard of ingenious repartee, the production promises timeless themes, an authentic set of characters and an Irish experience.

The Lepers of Baile Baiste is playing at the S??g??n Theatre at the Boston Center for the Arts through Nov. 23. Tickets start at $24 and are discounted for students. For more information, call the Box Office at 617-426-2787.