Watching Over Frank McGuinness' Stereotypes

Watching Over Frank McGuinness' Stereotypes HELEN LOJEK The opening of Frank McGuinness' Someone Who'll Watch Over Me at New York's Booth Theatre in November 1992, following successful runs at London's Hampstead and Vaudeville theatres, provided the first opportunity for.major American audiences to encounter the work of a playwright who has been a significant force in Irish theatre at least since his 1986 Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme. Winner of such accolades as Ihe London Standard Award, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the London Fringe Award, and the Harvey's Best Play Award, McGuinness has exhibited a restless creativity in works ranging from the straight realism of Factory Girls (1982) to the extravagant experimentation and expressionism of Innocence (1986). In Someone Who'll Watch Over Me, he blends elements from both extremes (and his first American character) to create what is for American audiences his most accessible play yet. And with it he has added a New York Drama Critics Circle Award to his list of prizes. In this play about Middle East hostages such familiar elements as stereotypes , cliches, pop culture, and literary quotations provide refreshingly new perspectives, and without ever focusing specifically on the current Irish "Troubles" McGuinness casts a revealing light on the human factors which lie behind both those Troubles and the Mideast crisis. Most amazingly, he discovers behind depressing current newspaper headlines stories which renew our faith in the power of the human spirit. The back cover of the published text sets the play's basic situation: "An Englishman, an Irishman and an American are locked up logether in a cell in the Middle East.'" New York playgoers got comparable information from the program: "a lowbrow Irish journalist" is "chained 10 the wall of [aJ dingy Beirut basement along with an athletic American and a prissy Brit.,,2 For audience members who have read neither text nor program and have Modern Drama, 38 ('995) 348 Frank McGuinness' Stereotypes 349 missed the implications of the characters' sharply contrasting accents, Edward (the Irish journalist) provides his own formulaic summary: "There were three bollocks in a cell in Lebanon. An Englishman, an Irishman, and an American" (17)· Wherever and however the formulation is phrased, it sets a familiar context, that of the international ethnic joke, which begins in the same conventional tenns. "Two Englishmen, fwo Germans, and two Americans were on a ship that sank," the cocktail wit starts his tale. Or, "An Englishman, a Frenchman, and a Texan are on an overloaded plane about to crash...." Such jokes depend on a common set of regional stereotypes - stereotypes which they in tum popularize and circulate. Like ethnic nicknames, the jokes can be forms of verbal aggression, and such humor relies on stereotypes which are generally regarded as contributing factors in the deep-seated prejudices which pit groups against each other} McGuinness' characters provide an abundance of that delight in the familiar which is basic to ethnic jokes. The American is physical, competitive, concerned with commercial value (in this case, his own value to his captors), proud of his Americanism, concerned with his looks. Because he is an African American,4 he (by his own testimony) also possesses an unusually large penis. The Irishman is Catholic, likes soccer, horses, and drink, has a wife to whom he is unfaithful and children to whom he is an absentee father. He also has the gift of gab. And (by his own testimony) he shares the belief that the Irish invented foreplay - and that drink is foreplay (9). In fact, on the surface this Irishman epitomizes the very qualities of "easy buffoonery and sentiment " which W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Edward Martyn sought to banish from the Irish stage. The Englishman is precise, prissy, educated, attached to his mother, and worried others will question his sexuality. He regards Irish as a dialect of English and cannot understand why he is being blamed for a f",mine which took place one hundred and fifty years ago. Names underscore these ethnic stereotypes. Adam Canning is the American . Edward Sheridan has (as Dr. Johnson said of Thomas Sheridan) "the disadvantage of being an Irishman." He also...