Irish Theater in America: Essays on Irish Theatrical Diaspora

10. Another Look at Those "Three Bollocks in a Cell": Someone Who'll Watch Over Me and the Shackles of History

1 2 4 10 Another Look at Those “Three Bollocks in a Cell” Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me and the Shackles of History c l a i r e g l e i t m a n When Frank McGuinness’s Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me premiered on Broadway in 1991, it seemed perfectly pitched to bring its author the international recognition that had so far eluded him.1 Though McGuinness’s work was largely unknown in the United States at that time, Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me secured both a Broadway run and an illustrious cast that included Stephen Rea, who was then enjoying wide acclaim as a result of his leading role in The Crying Game, which had just arrived in U.S. cinemas. Moreover, the play itself appeared likely to have broad appeal, given its timeliness . Its subject is three men—one Irish, one British, and one American— who are taken hostage in Lebanon and are imprisoned together in a single cell. Throughout most of its nine scenes, the men are chained to the wall and must maintain strength, sanity, and sense of humor as best they can while their offstage captors determine what to do with them. These circumstances clearly call to mind the experiences of Brian Keenan, John McCarthy, and Terry Anderson who were held hostage in Lebanon in the late 1980s and early 1990s and were confined together for a portion of that period. Yet McGuinness’s play also evokes other, more literary associations. Summarized differently, Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me stages the efforts of immobilized men to pass the time while they await release, death, or some other unfathomable fate whose shape depends on the whims of an inscrutable, insistently absent force. By implicitly quoting Waiting for Godot, McGuinness places his Another Look at Those “Three Bollocks in a Cell” | 125 play in two landscapes simultaneously: one historical and political; the other literary and archetypal. These two landscapes have much to tell us about the play itself, about its relationship to the historical moment in which it was written, and about the different ways in which we might view it in the wake of 9/11 and the Iraq War—events that were unimaginable when McGuinness wrote his play but that cast long shadows upon it when we return to read or see it today. Despite the fact that Someone appeared to have all the necessary ingredients for success, the crushing review it received from Frank Rich—then the notoriously influential chief theater critic for the New York Times—might well have brought about a hasty closing. In Rich’s judgment, the play was both “facile” and “dull.” Its characters, he wrote, were “schematically and . . . stereotypically drawn” and the play itself was “sporadically amusing without being riveting, moving or . . . credible”: Not even Beckett always succeeded in keeping plays about boredom from being boring. And Mr. McGuinness, if a charming writer in spurts, is no Beckett. The review heaped particular scorn upon McGuinness’s depiction of the character Adam, whom Rich described as “an Irish writer’s laughably clichéd notion of a contemporary black American: a saintly, muscle-bound doctor who, amazingly enough, bursts into an angelic rendition of ‘Amazing Grace’ while the white folks look on in dumbstruck awe.”2 As it turned out, Rich’s review was not lethal; Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me ran on Broadway for a respectable 216 performances and garnered Tony award nominations for both its author and for Stephen Rea. Yet other American critics also complained that the play’s characters are “neat types” and that, with his representation of the African American, “McGuinness flirts, no doubt unwittingly, with insult”—particularly when Adam goes so far as to brag about his penis size.3 It happens that, although a black actor was cast in the original British and U.S. productions of the play, the role of the American was not originally conceived for a black man and has often been played by white actors. Regardless of whether Adam is read as African American, a careful look at McGuinness’s drama will reveal that most of his insults are not unwitting at all, nor is his manipulation of character types. As has been noted often, McGuinness purposefully manipulates stereotypes in order to break them down and show their danger. Yet, as Helen 126 | c l a i...