Give a hearty welcome to Kwaku Fortune making his Manhattan stage bow—a truly auspicious bow, no question—in the world premiere of The Black Wolfe Tone at the Irish Repertory Theatre’s downstairs space. This is a Fishamble: The New Play Company/IRT co-production, subsequently to be seen in Dublin and elsewhere.
Kwaku is an imposing barrel-chested actor with a robust bass-baritone voice that seems to rise from a steel diaphragm. His face, his gestures reveal emotions detonating by the nanosecond from a core of infinitely deep and roiling emotions. He’s the kind of performer who immediately looks destined for the heavy-weight roles: Othello, James Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Joe in Show Boat, Herald Loomis in August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.
In other words, he’s the kind of actor due marquee distinction and proving as much right now with great force in The Black Wolf Tone, a semi-autobiographical work that takes place in a claustrophobic outdoor yard at Ireland’s Newcastle Mental Hospital. The set is predominantly light grey with medium-sized tree, by Maree Kearns. (Any vague resemblance to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot may have briefly occurred to one or more of the participating personnel, chief among them extremely in-charge director Nicola Murphy Dubey.)
The asylum is apparently the “semi-” part of Fortune’s story—institutionalization is not a chapter in his history—but it’s pertinent. This is the format in which he wants to explore his puzzled psyche. Referring to himself as Kevin, he’s an anxious man delaying a meeting with the psychiatric cadre treating him. On this encounter it’s up to them to decide whether he has finished his stay and can be released. While it’s ostensibly their conclusion, Kevin’s not entirely convinced that even if they are in favor of his leaving, he agrees.
His internal debate, made dramatically external for 70 or so intermissionless minutes, takes the form of narrating his life story. In a program note, he explains that a particular incident, one of many he’s experienced in his Ireland homeland prompted him to write the play—obsessively, it appears.
Seems he was on a bus a while back when a rude fellow accosted him, suggesting he return to his country of origin. Replying that’s exactly where he was, Fortune tacked on a Celtic phrase, which the assailant, not recognizing the words, mocked. The response started Fortune thinking about the significant changes through which Ireland has gone in recent decades, changes evidently not entirely absorbed.
As a result, Fortune’s Kevin has become unsure of how he regards himself as both integrated and not integrated into his society and culture. As he sees it, an interior tug-of-war is behind his mental challenges, often expressed in poetic phrases emphasizing a profound Irish influence—“the rage felt by both of us peels off in waves,” he exhorts at one point, recalling a rough relationship with his father.
Alternating between aggressive activity—more than once all but invading the audience—and retrogressively cowering in a niche behind the tree or leaping on a wooden bench and flattening himself against the grey wall, he fills in his background, not necessarily in chronological order. (Talking about a one-night incarceration, he scrawls the words “garda scum” on the wall, an attempt to ignite his jailors.)
Having entered fervently in pajamas, a bathrobe and listening to music through earphones, Kevin reports on his abusive white Irish father and tender Black mother and goes on to remember his many rebellions and retreats. At times, he carries on both sides of a conversations with one of his doctors. Discussing his lows, he does indulge humor. “That old chestnut,” he calls his brush (is there more than one?) with suicide.
Tirelessly listing abuse he’s suffered and, by implication, has placed him where he is, Kevin compares himself to late 18th-century Irish revolutionary Wolfe Tone, hence the title and his allying himself that much more meaningfully to his birthplace. He identifies Tone as “the enlightened Protestant forming the United Irishmen. Fighting for the downtrodden, for a better Ireland, for equal rights and equal opportunities for all.”
His likening himself to the hero and eventual martyr is a claim that—aside from underlining his being steeped in Irish history—can be interpreted as grandiosity or desperation or, more likely, both. By the time Kevin’s hardly exhausted monolog concludes, it confirms both his innate strengths and tangled psychological distresses. It also confirms Fortune as an actor worth watching and watching for.
Reviewer’s Note: Although The Black Wolfe Tone is a solo show, a voice is heard twice summoning Kevin to the doctors confab. Clare Barrett supplies the eerily otherworldly requests. By one of those odd theater coincidences, Barrett is currently on stage at the Irish Arts Center in the impressive The United States vs Ulysses.
The Black Wolfe Tone opened May 8, 2025, at the Irish Repertory Theatre and runs through June 1. Tickets and information: irishrep.org
