Belfast Blues
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Hughes has been living in the United States almost continuously since 1989, but like every good Irish expat writer since Joyce, she clearly has a need to confront the demons of her native land. According to a program note for Belfast Blues, that need was galvanized by the September 11 attacks and the pending battle in Afghanistan: Hughes knows about life in a war zone. She lived as a child in Divis Flats, one of the worst housing projects in Belfast and a hotbed of IRA activity. Later her family moved to a more comfortable home, but it was only two blocks from the ironically named “peace line”–a wall separating Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods. She saw things no kid should have to witness, and it’s a testament to her courage and character that she’s able to tell her story with so much wit, compassion, and charm.
In recent years Irish dramatists from the north and south of the island have split pretty cleanly along gender lines. The Republic has largely exported male playwrights who tend to focus on violence: long-simmering family disputes (Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane and The Lonesome West), brutal criminal activity (Conor McPherson’s The Good Thief), and grotesque Tarantino-like gore (Mark O’Rowe’s Howie the Rookie). Meanwhile in Northern Ireland, women playwrights have had the field almost entirely to themselves since at least 1985, when Anne Devlin’s Ourselves Alone provided an incendiary look at the 1981 IRA hunger strike in Long Kesh Prison. Marie Jones’s most popular play–the 2001 Broadway show Stones in His Pockets–explores one of Hughes’s themes: the effect of a Hollywood film on the aspirations of Irish locals.
I don’t think Hughes’s relative lack of investment in others’ stories is a product of ego. After all, this isn’t a vanity project–she’s writing about an astonishingly difficult childhood whose elements of poverty, crime, and discrimination have significant cultural resonance. Perhaps she’s chosen to focus on herself because that’s what she knows best–and for a first-time playwright she’s done a masterful job of weaving together the voices of people she obviously loves. She can act the hell out of this material, and her piece is remarkably free of cheap sentiment. Still, she seems a little afraid of confronting her tale’s darker shadows. At one point she rhapsodizes about director Schaefer’s “clean, soapy, American” scent during their first interview. Now, however, like the Northern Irish women playwrights who’ve preceded her, Hughes needs to let Belfast’s unsavory odor register–and linger.
Info: 773-325-1700
