On its surface, the setting of Sebastian Harry’s one-act play On Blueberry Hill is as close to hell as anything Sartre or Swift dreamed up. Two men, one in advanced middle age and one about a decade older, share a bunk bed in what’s revealed to be a cell in Dublin’s Mountjoy Prison. Their crimes, we will soon learn—both horrific—have given each reason to loathe the other, and yet they have been stuck together for two decades, with no apparent end in sight.
But there is, in this extraordinary (if imperfect) work, a path to transcendence, involving that most challenging of virtues, forgiveness, and fellow feeling. Through alternating monologues, Barry, a playwright and novelist whose acclaimed books include A Long Long Way and The Secret Scripture, introduces us to a pair of characters with seemingly little in common: PJ, played by the magnificent Irish actor David Ganly, is hefty and soft of flesh by his own description—a man of reflection rather than action, which makes the nature of the criminal act he admits to all the more ironic and jarring. (Saying any more about the act, or that of his cell mate, would require spoilers.) A seminarian in his former life as a free man, PJ conveys both a surprisingly earthy erudition and a probing, wracked conscience, both qualities that Ganly relays with piercing force.
The elder Christy, played by Ganly’s duly treasured compatriot Niall Buggy, is lean, spry and unmistakably, proudly working-class—the son of a tinker, he tells us early on, who died in a “feud fight.” (That both PJ and Christy lost their fathers while still children plainly figures into their twisting journeys to Mountjoy, and their relationship with each other.) But a tenderness and even a sense of reverence emerge in him, too, when he remembers his kids, or the wife he met when she was 17. Christy recalls their wedding, with “us all coming out into the late twilight of a summer’s night, happy as larks with the skinful of beer and burnt chicken, oh yes, and the wide bay lying there before us like the bedclothes of God.”
Barry does not hold back in charting his characters’ flights of sentiment; I stopped scribbling down similes about a half hour in, my fingers exhausted. But it would be impossible, unthinkable, to draw Christy without a bit of the blarney, and Buggy’s predictably deft performance, with its expert comic timing, mines the knowing wit in Barry’s portrait, and makes Christy’s more earnest moments, when he threatens to come undone in rage or despair, all the more affecting.
I found Ganly even more mesmerizing, in part because I’d never seen him on stage before, but also for the blazing intensity and sheer weight—in the best, most natural sense—he brings to PJ’s lines, which can be equally wry and raw in their lyricism but are clearly more informed by learning, and by tortured contemplation. Referring to a young man he loved and lost under harrowing circumstances, PJ recalls, “There was nothing of the child in him, nothing of the man, like a marble statue, glowing, vibrant, but also frozen—eternal…If I could properly describe him I think everything would be understood. But God didn’t give us words for it.”
The role of sexual repression in sealing PJ’s doom might have been examined, in a different play, in light of ongoing accusations and revelations of abuse by clergy members. Certainly, Barry makes us aware of the weight that very different social factors and expectations have placed on both his characters. But the playwright is more interested in what eventually bonds them, in spite of everything conspiring against that ever happening. Against the stark backdrop of Sabine Dargent’s threadbare set, director Jim Culleton has his players gradually rise up and move about, edging closer even as their accounts stay separate. They remain foils, Ganly (despite looking a good 15 years younger than PJ’s listed age, late 50s) exuding a premature weariness and moroseness while Buggy’s Christy still has the old buzz of mischief about him, and pride.
But by the end of On Blueberry Hill, when the titular Fats Domino hit that opens the show, a song from Christy’s youth, is sung, PJ and Christy are fellow spirits in ironic but genuine exultation. “I found my freeee-dom,” Christy croons, substituting the prisoner’s ultimate desire in the lyric. For the audience, though, the pair of powerhouse performances on display in this production will indeed provide a thrill, and then some.
On Blueberry Hill opened January 13, 2019, at 59E59 and runs through February 3. Tickets and information: 59e59.org
