Potent poetry

Voices carry at the Blackstone

by Bill Rodriguez

FAINT VOICES. By John McKenna. Directed by Mary Lee Partington. With Glenn Siner, Denise King, Skip Healy, and Bridget Fitzgerald. At the Blackstone River Theatre March 11 and 23.

There's a lot of urgency driving Irish music, and no source has been more vital than the country's poets. From Yeats with his mystical winding gyres to pub poets and their pint-lifting to Easter Rebellion patriots, they've powered a sturdy heartbeat. So it's appropriate that Blackstone River Theatre, which has scheduled mostly music concerts and dances, has come up with a program of poetry and drama. Along with concerts of Irish music on March 11 and 23, the poems of Francis Ledwidge will be read, followed by staged readings of Faint Voices, John McKenna's prize-winning short play about the poet who died in World War I.

Last week the opening performance showed a production more polished than a "reading" often indicates. Well-rehearsed, under the direction of Mary Lee Partington, the four characters are costumed, with lighting by Doug Brunelle that guides us along nicely. Recorded background music by Skip Healy sets a reflective mood. Joining the poet (Glenn Siner) in this half-hour memory play are his mother (Bridget Fitzgerald), his friend Matty McGoona (Skip Healy), and his sweetheart Ellie Vaughey (Denise King). We enter the reveries and conversations among the two dead lovers and the friend, as Mrs. Ledwidge lays down a mournful background reminiscence.

We learn first from the play that there was plenty to mourn about even before Francis's death. He was with a half-dozen other soldiers when a German shell landed in their trench-digging detail. His father died young, and his older brother died of tuberculosis when he was still a boy. That was typical village life, so to speak, outside the County Meath town of Slane.

Such hardship gave unspoken depth to the lyrical and pastoral, if florid, Edwardian poetical style that Ledwidge adopted. More than just his mother was impressed by his talent, as his verse was discovered by a local landowner, Lord Dunsany, who was also a writer. Respect and friendship resulted, and more importantly patronage. (The play doesn't tell us, but Dunsany gave Francis run of the castle library as well as a small stipend to allow him to write.)

Faint Voices, however, is more interested in the poet's romance with Ellie Vaughey, daughter of a prosperous local farming family. The young woman is flighty and loves to laugh more than she likes his poetry. The play has us see her regret, and Ledwidge's forgiveness, after she bows to family advice and turns away this pauperish poet and workman in favor of a suitor with better prospects. She moves off to Manchester and an unhappy marriage.

Despite winning a 1995 one-act play competition in Ireland, Faint Voices muddles the potential dramatic satisfactions that its colorful subject offers. Perhaps conveying the life of the romantic poet as a romance was too easy to resist. But after all, we are shown a superficial young woman who is traumatized by housework when she eventually marries, and who, when it came down to it, chose financial security over the poet. Hardly a Beatrice worth going through hell for -- or even to Manchester.

Frustratingly, sometimes the play tells us about crucial conversations rather than having us witness them, such as when Matty tells Ledwidge about Ellie's new beau. We are informed that when workers in the local mine are killed in cave-ins, their bodies are left outside while work resumes. But never mentioned is one dramatic incident that would have given us insight into the poet as well as that plight: Ledwidge put all he had into trying to organize the local copper miners, but in the end not one of the 100 of them stood by him, so he was fired.

Blackstone River Theater is now in a trim new home, after a four-year hiatus renovating the place. The stage is small but serviceable, and more plays are promised.

On Sunday, March 11 at 2 p.m., Faint Voices will be followed by a concert with fiddler Chris McGrath, flutist Jimmy Noonan, plus Ted Davis and Mike Shorrock. On Friday, March 23 at 8 p.m., Galway singer-songwriter Sean Tyrrell will perform before the readings.