Taking sides Firehouse’s A Night in November BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	A Night In November By Marie Jones. Directed by Rachel Walshe. With Michael Healy, Gabe Hannon, Ger O’Connor, Deb McGowan, Seamus McConnell, and Sharon Coleman. At Firehouse Theater through February 5.

The "Troubles" in Northern Ireland have long plagued both sides of the problem, but it is the Catholic perspective that most often gets dramatized. Marie Jones A Night in November is a refreshing exception now being staged at Firehouse Theater (and co-produced by Newport Celtic Productions).

A Belfast actor as well as playwright, Jones is best known for Stones In His Pocket, a non-political tale about a Hollywood film crew invading a County Kerry community. Both plays are told from mostly male perspectives and are designed as virtuoso showcases for an actor or two narrating and playing multiple roles. For the Newport production, however, director Rachel Walshe does a good job of opening up the play with several actors.

All the action revolves around Kenneth McCallister (Michael Healy), a Northern Ireland dole clerk, a Protestant who comes to see his own contributions to Irish discord. He eventually ends up traveling to New York to rah-rah alongside Catholic soccer fans when the Republic of Ireland is facing Italy for the 1994 World Cup championship.

The storytelling is as formulaic as that account allows, but the Newport production is rallied into an engaging evening by the able acting of the half-dozen performers, particularly Healy.

We start out watching McCallister checking under his car for explosives as he tells us about how he, a dull little government clerk, came to be such a threat to the world of cross-cultural enmity. His first insight comes at his desk in the welfare office after he has made a Catholic applicant wait all day for the offense of standing up for himself. (This hardly can have been the first time one of his bureaucratic victims patiently but firmly objected to his arrogance, but Gabe Hannon makes the incident plausible for us.)

McCallister’s education proceeds when he gives his Catholic supervisor (Ger O’Connor) a ride home — across town, past tanks and soldiers, where he’d never been in his life. McCallister is charmed by such homey touches as toys on the lawn and disordered bookshelves. His own lawn, you see, is kept manicured to within a millimeter of its life, per order of the missus, and leather-bound books are for display only. His straight-laced wife, Debra (Deb McGowan), is as intolerant about her own housekeeping failings as she is about Catholics — who, she says, deserve their deprivations. Her usual response to the first word about politics is to drown it out with the vacuum cleaner.

The most extreme Protestant stereotype is McCallister’s loudmouth father-in-law, Ernie (Seamus McConnell), whose "Feinian scum!" shouts McCallister has to endure at the World Cup qualifying match between Northern Ireland and the republic of Ireland. The furious Ernie makes clear why the typical Catholic fan (a wide-eyed Hannon) would remain stock-still at every Republican goal, not to mention at the eventual victory.

So while not a soccer fan himself, McCallister comes to the decision that his best way to fight bigotry is to support Ireland in the finals. He has already alienated not only his wife but also their friends, represented by Pauline (Sharon Coleman), who knits little pom-pommed covers to keep his golf clubs warm — the height of middle-class Protestant status, we are informed, is to become a member of a golf club.

The payoff for him, the play, and us is his trip to New York and transformation into a delirious, olé-shouting, bottle-clinking soccer booster. He is befriended by an amiable fan — played by McConnell, who annoyed us so well as the violent Ernie — who takes him under his wing, getting him a floor to sleep on and tossing him a flag-emblazoned T-shirt to pull over his white shirt and tie. This concluding section contains none of the motivation puzzlements we’ve experienced earlier. When we see McCallister as one of the gang, singing one-line songs with them (they are easier to remember when drunk, he is informed), we are reminded how group behavior can work to bond as easily as divide.

But whether or not A Night in November convinces us that a person with McCallister’s experiences would make as profound a change of life as he does, Walshe’s direction keeps us clear about where every character is coming from. Also helpful, before the play begins, are overhead projections of text and photos that familiarize us with events and images in the history of the Troubles. Despite the weaknesses of the play, this ensemble pumps quite convincing life into that history.