Review: THE FERRYMAN at New Village Arts

Our first glimpse into the Carney household appears to be a scene of tender domesticity: a man and a woman at a kitchen table, drinking, laughing, bantering over musical tastes and playing a game of Connect 4, first the usual way, and then with blindfolds on, bringing them physically closer together. Then they dance. This feels like a date. Until it's interrupted by the arrival of a 9-year-old girl who asks - as a 9-year-old would in this situation - "What are you two doing?" and then announcing that she wants to blow the horn. Which the two adults allow her to do. Because it's morning and the day needs to begin.

And out onto the stage (designed by Doug Cumming for New Village Arts) arrive the Carney casts of... well not thousands exactly, but dozens...great uncles and aunts, some walking, others in a wheelchair, and seven more children, ages 7 to 16, one carrying a newborn. Not everybody occupies that same space at the same time, at least not until a family gathering later in Jez Butterworth's THE FERRYMAN, when three teens arrive to share the harvest feast.

Turns out that Connect 4 scene was a little bit of a dodge. The two people we watched a few moments ago are Quinn Carney (played by Thomas Edward Daugherty) and his sister-in-law, Caitlin (Joy Yvonne Jones). Seven of these children belong to Quinn. The eighth is Caitlin's. Quinn and Caitlin are not a couple, although appearances suggest otherwise. Nor will we, the audience, be the only ones to observe Quinn and Caitlin together and make that mistake. We will meet Quinn's wife, Mary Carney, (Kym Pappas) later.

And there is a larger misperception than this at the core of THE FERRYMAN. It's 1981 in rural Northern Ireland and most of the members of this big sprawling farming family are exactly whom they appear to be, with the exception of one person who was once something else. The play is set deep in the midst of The Troubles, which will ultimately encroach on the Carneys' domesticity. Caitlin's husband Seamus, Quinn's brother, disappeared 10 years ago, and Quinn's family took the mother and son in. Now a reckoning is brewing. Some of the characters know it. And we know it.

The Tony Award-winning best play of 2019, THE FERRYMAN is a big play with a lot taking place. There are stories and painful memories, mysteries, romantic yearnings, rage over civil injustice, familial resentment and violence. The marketing folks at New Village Arts, which snagged the rights to the first production of THE FERRYMAN since its Broadway production, trumpet the play as an "epic...universally acknowledged as one of the greatest plays of the modern era."

Undoubtedly, you're going to need some resources, some budget, a willing audience and some good old-fashioned brass to stage a 3.5 hour play that calls for 21 actors including an infant, rabbits and a live goose. So huzzahs, most certainly, to NVA Executive Artistic Director Kristianne Kurner not only for having the moxie to program Butterworth's play in the first place, but also for directing it with the passion, fire and insight that the play deserves.

Overall, the production works on several levels, showcasing both the playwright's many talents and certainly those of the NVA company as well. As a portrait of a 1980s Irish family, the production fires on all cylinders with the interplay between the actors playing the Carneys being a joy to watch. You've got the approaching manhood swagger of the elder boys, the precociousness of the girls (f-bombs and all) and the seamless and manner in which everyone falls into step for a big old celebratory dance. This is a clan.

That includes the older generation. One of Quinn's aunts, Maggie Faraway (Dagmar Krause Fields) sits largely in a catatonic state, lost in her own mental journeys except for the periodic occasions when she "comes back" to tell of her travels. Whenever this happens, the Carney girls gather excitedly around to listen to her stories. Tales, this play has aplenty. Many come from the lips of gabby Uncle Patrick (Antonio TJ Johnson) or from Aunt Pat (Grace Delaney), an angry and fiercely proud woman whose ear is glued to the radio for any fresh news of the hunger strikers and of any anti-Irish slights from Margaret Thatcher. With rare exceptions, the accents are strong and consistent (credit to cultural consultant Gracey Delaney and Amanda Doherty and to dialect coaches Jude McSpadden, Vanessa Dinning and Delaney again).

There is, as previously noted, a boatload at play in this tale as the Carneys prepare for the harvest feast. Important news has arrived related to Seamus which means some shady characters from his past will be sniffing around the Carney abode along with the family priest Father Horrigan (Darren Scott) who is strong-armed into getting involved. A brain- damaged farmhand, Tom Kettle (Dallas McLaughlin), is sweet on Caitlin. The arrival of the teenage Corcoran cousins Declan (Bugz Baltzer), Diarmaid (Levani Korganashvili) and Shane (Layth Haddad) establish that the link between this family and the civil turomil run even deeper than we originally realized. Audiences thinking THE FERRYMAN will be a story of revelry and blarney should be warned. The play will get plenty grim.

Daugherty's Quinn is the production's anchor, a character forced - at great cost - to straddle the domestic demands of being his family's patriarch and the encroachment of outside entities. As close as he clearly is with his brood of children, there is something broken between Quinn and Mary making the interactions between Daugherty and Pappas's damaged Mary painful to watch. A stronger charge could exist between Daugherty and Jones, whose Caitlin spends a lot of the action pissed off. Fields lays into Aunt Maggie's dreaminess with such finesse that - like the Carney girls - we delight in her return.

A play with a cast this size can be an exercise in crowd control. Director Kurner keeps the various plot lines and tonal shifts clear and the younger actors Lena Palke, Priya Richard and Lucy Zavatterro deserve some serious props for playing these characters as they are without over-leaning into their cuteness.

THE FERRYMAN is the first play to take the stage at NVA's newly renovated and renamed Conrad Prebys Theatre at the Dea Hurston New Village Arts Center. After an endeavor like this, it will be most intriguing to see what this company does for an encore.

THE FERRYMAN plays through March 5 at New Village Arts.

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