Every once in a while a reviewer is reminded of how deep the acting resources go in this revered theater city. At least this reviewer often is, and it just happened again with Abbie Spallen’s Pumpgirl. That’s where the billed-in-alphabetical-order Hamish Allan-Headley, Labhaoise Magee, and Clare O’Malley are displaying their eye-popping, ear-singeing wares.
Pumpgirl is another of the contemporary Irish plays in which monologues are the conceit. The style owes much to Brian Friel, the initial and prominent monologue purveyor. (For substantiation, look at Friel’s first-rate Molly Sweeney, revived at the moment by The Keen Company.)
Pumpgirl is the chance for these three actors, all of whom have already accumulated smart resumés, to wrap their acting chops alternately around numerous pithy speeches. It has to be the opportunity Spallen offers that’s calling such undivided attention to their exultant talents. The monologues—as Spallen designs them and Nicola Murphy directs them with crafty craft—are so deliciously meaty, they give Allan-Headley, Magee, and O’Malley much juicy to chew on.
Spallen focuses on three people whose lives are increasingly tangled up with each other’s in a small North Ireland town where everybody knows everyone else’s business, to universal dismay. The title Pumpgirl (Magee), a mannish woman working at a petrol station (known stateside as a gas station), has a severe crush on local macho man Hammy. To some measure, Hammy has time for the Pumpgirl, but he is hardly as serious about the fling as she wishes he would be.
Strutting around like the cock of the walk, Hammy is having trouble at home, where wife Sinead, mother of Hammy’s two children, is feeling unnoticed. She’s feeling so ignored that on a day when Hammy isn’t due home from the chicken hatchery where he earns their keep and when the kids are being cared for elsewhere, she succumbs to the advances of Hammy’s mate, Shawshank, recently released from prison after claiming he’s been reborn.
As Michael O’Connor’s lights pinpoint each of the three, their attempts to relieve the unhappiness stalking them only festers. It’s Hammy’s fate, for instance, to realize slowly that his bravado is getting him nowhere. He comes to see that he’s wrongly taken for granted the love shown him by his wife and children. Worse, he realizes it’s too late to make up for the loss. His grown-up boy’s awakening devastates him.
The Pumpgirl, a whiz at her petrol station duties, tries to convince herself that Hammy is gone on her, but she only gradually allows herself to admit he isn’t. At the same time, she puts up with other mistreatments, such as having to pay no attention to customers like the smart-aleck young one who asks, “Well we were just wondering like, if you were, like a man or a woman?” For Sinead, the wages of her infidelity are more costly that she imagined in her moment of retaliation for marital neglect—later made even more humiliating by the mocking Shawshank.
As indicated above, there’s no need to single out any of the three performers as having a jump on the others. It might be that Allan-Headley is required to walk the longest gamut from prideful rooster to foul depression. He lays out Hammy’s disintegration with muscled finesse. (His bio suggests he’s played Stanley Kowalski; if he hasn’t, he should.) Magee’s diminishing sense of self is also impressive. Incidentally, she’s mastered the art of positioning a baseball cap on her head. (Molly Seidel is the costumer, who cleverly found the flashy jacket Hammy prizes.) O’Malley’s housewife and mother, in her mounting existential distress, is another success.
Is there anything amiss with Pumpgirl? Yes, the title, which implies that Spallen had composed this contemporary instance of painful Irish keening as the Pumpgirl’s play. It isn’t. Each of the characters is equally important, which is surely the underlining point of Yu-Hsuan Chen’s gritty triptych set. (It features a row of pump handles on the wall behind the Pumpgirl and elsewhere a skimpy kitchen to which Sinead keeps repairing and a slanted bed to which she hustles to rest.)
The entwined Hammy-Sinead-Pumpgirl destinies are the stuff of Spallen’s contemporary tragedy. (Edith Wharton’s cataclysmic novella Ethan Frome comes to mind.) Sometimes a dramatist’s abundant measure of despair can have the effect of unnecessary overload. Not here. Spallen’s demonstration that no bad deed goes unpunished registers as entirely warranted. Strap the Must-See banner on this one.
Pumpgirl opened November 14, 2019, at the Irish Repertory Theatre and runs through December 29. Tickets and information: irishrep.org
