October 30, 2009 / GO Brooklyn / Brooklyn Heights–Downtown / Theater / The Butcher of Flatbush Avenue Extension

Irish import at St. Ann’s Warehouse is truly ‘Electric’

By Gersh Kuntzman

The Brooklyn Paper

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Toni Wilkinson

Stuck in reverse: Breda (Rosaleen Linehan) relives the worst night of her life, over and over again, in "The New Electric Ballroom" at St. Ann's Warehouse through Nov. 22.

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It’s as if “No Exit” kissed the Blarney Stone.

Words, massive amounts of words, strung together into long, gorgeous, meaty, metaphor-laden sentences that combine into spirited, brilliant, heart-wrenching monologues are bouncing all over the walls at St. Ann’s Warehouse in DUMBO, where Enda Walsh’s “The New Electric Ballroom” opened last Tuesday for a month-long run.

This claustrophobic play, set in a dour room shared by three sisters in a horrible fishing town, is as hellish as Satre’s Existential drama, but the Frenchman did not have the Irishman Walsh’s gift of gab.

For Walsh, who had a hit last year at St. Ann’s with “The Walworth Farce,” the action of the play, such as it is, is secondary to these words. In fact, the entire play exists solely so its four characters — the sisters, Clara, Breda and Ada, plus Patsy the fishmonger — can relive a singular moment in all of their pasts.

For Clara and Breda, it is that moment, roughly 40 years earlier, when both briefly attracted the attention of Roller Royle, an Elvis-like figure who performed one night at the New Electric Ballroom in a neighboring town.

Clara, the prettier of the two frozen-in-time sisters, first gets to recount her version of the story, the version in which she interrupts the Roller’s make-out session with Breda. Later, Breda spits out her almost-identical version, agonizing over the love affair that was in flagrante when Clara messed it all up.

All the while, Ada, far younger than both her siblings, but no less stuck in her own time-warp, plays a secondary role — evidence that a night in the sisters’ household is a feedback loop every night of their lives (in fact, one of the key props on the sparse set is a reel-to-reel tape recorder).

To sit in the audience of “The New Electric Ballroom” is to be bludgeoned repeatedly with these words — the set paragraphs about the bike ride to the ballroom, the sweat on the girls’ backs, the clatter of the cobblestones, the cannery “turning fish into money,” the “little shoebox” that Patsy calls his bedroom, the confidence that both girls feel from hearing the Roller say the words, “You meet me after” — yet also to be spellbound in a way that only words, stunningly rendered by four actors at the top of their game, can concoct.

The standout in the cast is Patsy (Mikel Murfi), who enters with his fish twice a day and is never invited in “as a guest.”

After what seems like years of this kind of treatment, he is finally invited in — and is stripped down by Clara (Ruth McCabe) and Breda (Rosaleen Linehan) for a baptism, of sorts, that rebirths him as the Roller himself. But rather than be drawn into Clara and Breda’s sickness, Patsy gains a new confidence, and his unconsummated love for Ada moves closer to a satisfactory conclusion.

And then…

Another torrent of words, and the fishmonger reveals his own, heretofore unknown connection to that night at the New Electric. The chance at breaking the pattern that has consumed all four lives is suddenly lost forever as he spins his tale.

It’s an unremittingly bleak finish to a gut-punch of a play. In the hands of a less poetic playwright — and less-talented actors — it would be a disaster. But a one-way ticket to hell, loneliness and dementia can be a great night at the theater when stunning words like these meet great acting.

©2009 Community Newspaper Group

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