Shanley - Outside Mullingar

Outside Mullingar BOOKS BY JOHN PATRICK SHANLEY AVAILABLE FROM TCG Defiance Dirty Story and Other Plays INCLUDES: Dirty Story Wheres My Money? Sailors Song Doubt: A Parable Outside Mullingar Storefront Church (forthcoming) Outside Mullingar is copyright 2014 by John Patrick Shanley Outside Mullingar is published by Theatre Communications Group, Inc., 520 8th Avenue, 24th Floor, New York, NY 10018-4156 All Rights Reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio or television reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by an information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that this material, being fully protected under the Copyright Laws of the United States of America and all other countries of the Berne and Universal Copyright Conventions, is subject to a royalty. All rights, including but not limited to, professional, amateur, recording, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio and television broadcasting, and the rights of translation into foreign languages are expressly reserved. Particular emphasis is placed on the question of readings and all uses of this book by educational institutions, permission for which must be secured from the authors representative: George Lane, Creative Artists Agency, 405 Lexington Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, NY 10174, (212) 277-9000. The Darkness of an Irish Morning originally appeared in the New York Times on March 8, 2013.

Copyright 2013 by the New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited. Lyrics to Wild Mountain Thyme: Will You Go, Lassie, Go, Traditional, Arranged by The McPeake Family 1962 (Renewed) The English Folksong Society. All Rights administered by Chappell & Co., Inc.

All Rights Reserved. The publication of Outside Mullingar, by John Patrick Shanley, through TCGs Book Program, is made possible in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. TCG books are exclusively distributed to the book trade by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Shanley, John Patrick. Outside Mullingar / John Patrick Shanley. Title. Title.

PS3569.H3337O97 2014 812.54'dc23 2013050920 Cover, book design and composition by Lisa Govan Front cover photograph by Todd Heisler/New York Times/Redux Back cover photograph by iStockphoto First Edition, January 2014 Contents For my family, old and new, Irish and American, most especially for my sons Nick and FrankM y father came from Ireland and he had the gift of the gab. Part of the reason the Irish developed the gift of the gab was simple. They lived on an island. They had to get along. Not that they did get along. But they had to try.

So a style of speaking developed that allowed them to say awful things. With charm.I am not Irish. I am Irish-American. Some say I have the gift as well. If I do, it is because I listened to my father and my uncles and some of my aunts as they gave as good as they got in my living room in the Bronx. On many the Saturday night, they would drink rye and ginger ale, and smoke and talk and sing and dance, and I would sing, too, and dance with my aunts, and listen through the blue air.

And because I listened to so much talk and so much music, perhaps I was spared somehow from the truly unfortunate fate of being an uneloquent Irish-American.My father played a very particular accordion. It had his name spelled out in rhinestones, and emblazoned over his name, the crossed flags of Ireland and America, also in rhinestones. It was a wedding present from somebody, grandparents I think. All my grandparents were Irish and had died before I was born, so they melded in my mind into a kind of monolithic ancient green mush. My father played many Irish songs on this squeezebox, and Elvis Presleys Love Me Tender. When he sang it, it was the most Irish song of all.When I went to Ireland for the first time, in 1993, I was forty-two.

My father was in his late eighties, and I went with him to visit the family farm outside the village of Killucan, near the town of Mullingar, in County Westmeath. I had just gotten my New York drivers license a few weeks before, and I was a hideous driver. I had to drive for one hundred miles on the wrong side of the road. Periodically, my father would say, Watch out! as I was seconds from killing us both. By the time we got to the farm, I had lost a side mirror and was in a poor emotional condition.We turned into the rustic dirt driveway. The farm looked completely dead.

I could see a couple of motionless sheep on a distant ridgeotherwise, nothing. I rolled my rented car down to the farmhouse and shut it off. The silence was so complete I could feel it on my skin.I knocked. The door was opened softly and with caution. Looking at me was my cousin Anthony. His eyes burned with a mad blue intensity.

He greeted us quietly and in we went. In the house, which we entered by way of the kitchen, were stacks of people, all close relations.No sooner had we cleared the door than all hell broke loose. My Aunt Mary was sitting by the turf stove, leaning on a cane. She let fly with a vigorous speech, not one word of which I could understand, though she was apparently speaking English. Her husband, my Uncle Tony, turned out in a Greek fishing cap, white shirt and weathered vest, was waving a pipe. He had electric blue eyes as well, the eyes of a malamute, and a crafty, gleeful expression.

He, too, was holding forth, and although I could not understand a word of what he was saying either, his accent was utterly different than that of his wife. He spoke in a measured and forceful tone, while Marys declarations came out at the rate of water gushing from a fire hose.The one linguistic quality they shared was emphasis. Each and every thing they said was said with an air of such conviction it seemed impossible anyone could disagree. And yet, they did disagree, and attempted to shout down and dismiss every statement made by the other.Uncle Tony and Aunt Mary werent the only ones speaking in this small country kitchen, which smelled of brown bread, oatmeal, pipe smoke and turf. Several cousins were present and also speaking. Some were shouting that we must be exhausted, in shock from the severity of our journey, or hungry, or in need of a chair.

At least, these ideas were ones I thought I could pick out.My father watched all this with a serene expression. He had been coming here for many years, in addition to having been born here, and none of this, I suppose, was new to him. It was perhaps ten in the morning. Miraculously, a gap appeared in the conversation, and my cousin Audrey managed to ask if we would like breakfast. My father said he would like a drink of whiskey and sat down.