Ghosts Are Full Of Life In Interplayers’ ‘Da’

The Irish “da” (dad) in this Hugh Leonard play is enough to drive a son crazy. He is irascible, exasperating, small-minded and maddeningly … well, maddeningly happy.

He is also dead, but that doesn’t make him any less aggravating. In fact, it makes him even more aggravating, as son Charlie soon discovers, because a ghost is harder to get rid of.

At the end of the play, when Charlie walks out on his da one last time, his da merely walks through the walls of the house and goes with him. “Da” is a difficult play to categorize, because it is not exactly a feel-good comedy and not exactly a sentimental reminiscence.

It has elements of both, but it also has more cutting elements of catharsis. Frankly autobiographical, it seems that Leonard wrote this play less in loving admiration of his adoptive father than in frustrated exasperation.

At the end, it turns into acceptance, yet still, the frustration remains to the end, giving this play an edge that prevents it from becoming mawkish. One easy way to categorize this play: a wonderfully rich evening of theater. Leonard has created full, living characters, unlike any stock characters you have seen.

I found myself caring deeply about them, partly because they were so obviously fashioned from truth, and partly because they were portrayed by the cast so jaw-droppingly well. This entire play is truly a seminar on good acting.

A tremendous amount of talent and care has gone into fashioning these characters - and it all begins with craftsmanship. The accents, which would have been a minefield of phony brogues in lesser hands, are consistent, authentic and unobtrusive. More important are the elements of intelligence and humanity which everyone, and I do mean everyone, brings to their parts.

William Westenberg is brilliant as the son Charlie, his voice and bearing conveying the years of exasperation that he has endured. Watch Westenberg when he isn’t speaking - a disbelieving stare, delivered across the living room, is as eloquent as Leonard’s well-crafted dialogue. Yaakov Sullivan is astonishingly strong as the father.

He plays him like a feisty, animated old coot, capable of getting up and dancing an arthritic little jig when the spirit moves him. Sullivan’s best scene, and in fact the most crackling scene of the entire play, comes when he reveals himself as distinctly unlovable. In a nasty, jealous, bullying snit, he forbids his wife from going to tea at a fancy hotel.

Paula Nelson plays the mother as an Irish Edith Bunker, but without any of the stereotyped mannerisms that image might imply. She is at times breezy, at times loving, and at times unfeeling, but always absolutely believable.

Everyone in director Joan Welch’s supporting cast is remarkable. Tim McMurray as the young Charlie, and Jay Jenkins as Charlie’s friend Oliver, deserve particular mention for making such quality acting look so easy.

The script itself is deserving of the praise heaped on it in New York and London. The plot device is not exactly original: A man watches scenes from his past life as “ghosts” file onto and off of the stage. It’s been done before, most famously in “Our Town.” It sometimes seems contrived, especially in the first act, but it becomes an effective and graceful device for a series of telling flashbacks. The play is fairly long, running almost two and a half hours, and the first act bogs down toward the end. But the second act gets off to a sizzling start and never lets up until the end.

We see the father become outlandishly grateful for a pittance of a pension after 54 years as a gardener with the same employer; and we see the son become filled with resentment over the same thing.

Leonard’s script is brim-filled with Irish slang (“shaggin’ seems to be the father’s favorite word) and it contains a few distinctly Irish themes (sexual inhibition and religion, to name two). Yet it transcends the genre of “Irish play” because the relationships and themes are universal.

Everybody, at some point in their lives, has felt tethered to some alien being that they call dad or mom or pop, or “da.” Here’s a play that explores those feelings in a most intelligent and entertaining way.

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MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: “Da” Interplayers Ensemble, Friday night, continues through April 6, call 455-PLAY