Eclipse Theatre Company opened the Columbus premiere of John Patrick Shanley’s Outside Mullingar, directed by Kathy Sturm, who also stars and handles set and lighting design.
Outside Mullingar is a dark-and-sweet comedy about his ancestral homeland, Ireland, during the last economic crisis. Patriarch Tony Reilly (Jim McCullough) is in deep reflection after the funeral of his next-door neighbor of many years, Christopher Muldoon. Tony’s most immediate concern is whether to pass his farm to his son Anthony (Bradley Davis Barbin), who “never loved it,” and “never drew strength from the ground,” though Anthony works those fields every day.
Tony considers selling the land to American relations to provide a nest egg to free Anthony from the farm’s burden. An old land deal with the Muldoons that created an easement separating Reilly’s farm from the road complicates those plans. And, as Christopher’s widow Aoife (Judy Parker) says, the deal is further complicated by her daughter Rosemary’s (Sturm) Draconian plan to keep Anthony connected to her.
More than just the people of Ireland, Shanley grapples with the verbose Irish storytelling tradition and its inherent gallows humor in Outside Mullingar. It holds all the generational conflict and peril of class structures audiences expect from an Irish play. Shanley also introduces more modern concerns: when Barbin roars Anthony’s exasperation in asking if a man is worthless because he does what’s right and never finds joy in the pursuit, the question hangs in the air as though a bomb detonated.
Shanley’s ear for speech and his keen sense of observation get caught in that classic discursive style; hobbling the play when it should soar. The repetition here doesn’t often rise to the level of music. Too often the characters say the same thing over and over, belaboring points the audience got twenty minutes ago.
Sturm’s direction does a good job of focusing on the emotional reality of these people in this place, but it struggles to find its tempo. Too often, the action feels listless and grasping. The elements gel at points – the final, sweet, scene, where Sturm and Durbin’s broken characters end up with honesty  at the end of their shared lonely road; the early scene where Parker and McCullough talk about the absent Chris Muldoon in a way that draws the character whole without us ever seeing him – but it can’t break out of that overall sense of ennui and inertia for long.
The best reason to see Outside Mullingar is Jim McCullough’s sharp and masterful performance. He doesn’t strike a false note in anything he does on stage here. Even as the character repeats himself (at length), he finds inflections in the language that keeps that hammering from being as annoying as it might in lesser hands. Barbin, Parker, and Sturm provide admirable support but this is McCullough’s show throughout, even vibrating through scenes after he departs.
Outside Mullingar is an interesting play for fans of John Patrick Shanley’s other, more developed work, and it’s nice seeing work that comes from such an open-hearted place of love. I just wish there was more substance or the jokes hit harder.
Outside Mullingar runs through July 8 with performances at 7:30 p.m. Thursday through Saturday and 2:00 p.m. Sunday. For tickets and more info, visit eclipsetheatrecompany.org
