from Matt DeCaro, Actor
On a break today, while we were in Northlight’s lovely Green room waiting for our terrific stage manager, Rita Vreeland, to call us up to the stage, I was watching the set on the downstairs monitor. It looked great on-camera – our Irish cottage, our home.
The lens caught the circular pattern of the floor and some of the ascending seats. The image suddenly evoked an ancient Greek theatre for me and I had one of those moments of pure happiness and gratitude for being able to play a small part in such an old and valuable tradition. To think that thousands of years later we still gather in stadium seating to share a story and look at ourselves can give me a bit of goose flesh.
Every time we play scene nine I am struck by Davey’s line, “Will it never end. Will it never fecking end?” A cry from Trojan Women? It feels very Greek to me. It echoes through History. Our playwright puts it to us fresh and unvarnished, violence is everyone’s responsibility. We are all culpable.
I play the Father of a psychopath or maybe he’s a sociopath, or maybe he’s just a poor kid born into poverty and hopelessness that suffered untold abuse at the hands of an alcoholic Father who himself had been born into poverty and powerlessness and was abused at the hands of an alcoholic Father who in turn was born into poverty…….and the cycle never ends.
As scene one opens Donny and Davey, who have forged a relationship from loneliness and drink, are at each other. A kick in the ass may be as comic as vaudeville but its still a kick in the ass. As Donny plays the scene with Davey we get some idea of just how abusive he must’ve been to his own son while he was growing up. His son leaves home to become a bomber for the INLA. Patriotism or an excuse to vent the pent up rage of the disenfranchised? Does brute strength breed violence or do feelings of impotence and powerlessness breed violence?
I think at the heart of McDonagh’s scathing indictment of terrorism he’s asking us first and foremost to stop terrorizing our children. We need to break the chain.
