All three of Enda Walsh’s plays in the Studio Theatre’s “New Ireland: The Enda Walsh Festival” are memory plays. In “Penelope,” the memory of Odysseus looms large for Penelope and her suitors. In “The Walworth Farce,” a father and his two sons daily rehearse their lives in Ireland and their move to England. In the third and final play, “The New Electric Ballroom,” two sisters repeat again and again the details of a night long ago, which might have allowed at least one of them to escape the narrow world in which they live. The night was in the 1960s, when a sexy singer made the girls swoon in a dance hall in their tiny Irish fishing village.
The sisters, Clara (Nancy Robinette) and Breda (Sybil Lines), are nearly 60. As they dress each other in the party dresses they wore that night, they demonstrate for their 40-year-old sister, Ada (Jennifer Mendenhall), why they can never leave the house, why she must be their link to the outside world.
| “The New Electric Ballroom” |
| By Enda Walsh |
| The Studio Theatre, 1501 14th St. NW |
| 8 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays; 7 p.m. Sundays; 8 p.m. April 26; 2 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays; through May 1 |
| Tickets: $44 to $65 |
| Box office: 202-332-3300 |
| studiotheatre.org |
There are many sources of power in Walsh’s writing: his ability to make the absurd and the sublime collide in his poetry, his sure comedic touch, his refusal give an inch to sentimentality and his ability to create unique, unforgettable characters.
Clara in “The New Electric Ballroom” is the oldest sister and Robinette portrays her masterfully: her Clara is a bit dotty, always wanting the comfort of tea and cake. Lines is unflappable as the down-to-earth Breda, who is sick of the old stories and who calls for a rewrite.
That rewrite involves Ada, whose poignant description of cycling to and from the cannery where she works provides an image of the world outside the sisters’ enclosed room. Mendenhall perfectly captures the mousy, emotionally dead Ada as she views the seaside town, with its narrow cobblestone streets. There is a fourth character in “Ballroom,” the fishmonger Patsy (Liam Craig), who is as desperate about his dead-end life as the sisters are about theirs. Craig is brilliant as the gossipy Patsy who, after some remodeling at Breda’s and Clara’s hands, briefly becomes a charismatic ballroom crooner.
Director Matt Torney clearly understands Walsh and how his plays need to be paced and spoken. Debra Booth’s set shows a room with a great door on the back wall. When open, it displays a blue sky and beneath it a bluer sea, but in the play only Patsy uses that door. Otherwise, it defines the limits of the sisters’ enclosure in their self-made fortress.
Walsh is one of the English-speaking world’s most accomplished young playwrights. The Studio Theatre is to be commended for bringing his plays to Washington.
