"The more personal you make it, the more universal it becomes."
So says Jonathan Wilde, director of the next in White Rock-based Peninsula Productions' series of dramatic play-readings – John Patrick Shanley's Outside Mullingar – Feb. 6 to Feb. 9 at the company's black box studio theatre (next to the arena at Centennial Park, 14600 North Bluff Rd.).
The play, which takes place in a small rural community near Mullingar in the Irish midlands, is described by Wilde as "a realistic/surrealistic, romantic fairy tale."
While it is a piece that is undeniably humorous, Wilde points out that most relatable comedy has at its core some form of human pain, requiring actors to draw on their own experiences and elements of their own personalities.
"We've been lucky enough to find actors willing to personalize this," he says. "But that comes at a cost."
Shanley's writing allows actors to go deeply into the characters, if they are prepared to make that investment, he says.
"I'm so glad we've found actors courageous enough to feel their way into these parts."
Outside Mullingar is a favourite play for the Alberta-born, New York trained actor and director, he admits. He's seen many excerpts and full productions of the play and been involved in readings of it before – and would like eventually to produce a fully staged version of the show.
While Shanley (famed for the romantic play and film Moonstruck) has invested Outside Mullingar with a wealth of detail and actual place names, it is also – as a sentimental piece in which Shanley finally acknowledged his own family background – deeply rooted in Irish myth and folklore and the naturally poetic expression of its people.
The play's focus is the story of the hopeless romance between two introverted people who live on neighbouring farms – Rosemary Muldoon (played by Vanessa Walsh) and Anthony Reilly (played by Ryan Cowie).
Rosemary, however, refuses to believe that the romance is hopeless. Now 35, she has loved Anthony since she was six years old.
Described as having "the eyes of a dreamer," at 42, Anthony is painfully shy – unwilling to believe that he is worthy of her romantic interest.
Rather, he believes he is cursed, "unfit" and incapable of finding love – and there's also the fact that his father has threatened to disinherit him because, although he knows nothing else, his heart is not in farming.
"It's a show that alludes to fairy tales, and they are, in some ways, fairy tale characters in a real life situation – but Rosemary is really the knight in shining armour, who must rescue Anthony," he says.
"She has a fighting stubbornness – she will not quit. She is dogged, she is single-minded, she is an impenetrable wall. That's why she's the hero of this – she never quits."
Complicating matters is that they are – or soon will be – the last surviving members of their two families and inheritors of a long-simmering feud over ownership of land on the boundary between their two properties.
Their last remaining relatives are Anthony's sharp-tongued, "ornery" father, Tony (played by Vancouver theatre veteran Andy Maton) and Rosemary's pragmatic, recently widowed mother Aiofe (P. Lynn Johnson).
"Both of them acknowledge that they don't have long on this earth and both are planning for the future, and what that's going to look like," Wilde says.
How Rosemary and Anthony struggle their way toward some form of happiness is a story told with a good share of laughs – but also some extremely touching scenes, Wilde says.
And it's a measure of actors Walsh, Cowie, Johnson and Maton that they are equally adept with the comedy as with finding the raw emotion underlying the scenes, he adds.
Wilde has no doubt that the relatability of the play, in their capable hands, will allow audiences to experience all the theatrical magic of Outside Mullingar – even without the elaborate sets and complete costume-plot of a fully staged production.
He acknowledges that some may still be resistant to the concept of staged readings, which allows a series like Peninsula's to explore, and bring to local audiences, a far wider range of plays than is prudent for more commercially driven venues.
"To me the difference between a dramatic reading, the way we're doing it and a full staging is the difference between making a cake and putting icing on it," he says.
"The icing might draw your attention, make you say 'look at that cake' – but you don't know what it is really like until you taste it. And if you taste the cake and it isn't good, you don't care about the icing!
"The real power of theatre is about the understanding of relationships and circumstances – and these are things that come through in a reading. Particularly in this day and age, when people are expected to get a whole play up in two months, the pressure is there to make it look good and get all the costumes together, without necessarily having the time to present more thoroughly investigated performances.
"To me a reading is an opportunity to bring people together to express and experience emotions that they may have had difficulty acknowledging in their own lives. And I'm grateful to Peninsula Productions for providing us with these kinds of opportunities."
Performances are at 7 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 6 and Friday, Feb. 7; 2 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 8 and Sunday, Feb. 9.
Tickets ($32.09) are available from peninsulaproductions.org or showpass.com/outside-mullingar-2/
