Irish Theater in America: Essays on Irish Theatrical Diaspora

2. From Scapegrace to Grásta: Popular Attitudes and Stereotypes in Irish American Drama

1 9 2 From Scapegrace to Grásta Popular Attitudes and Stereotypes in Irish American Drama m a u r e e n m u r p h y In The Politics of Irish Drama, Nicholas Grene argues that Irish drama is outward directed, a commodity for export that is valued for its Irish “otherness ,” an “otherness” that creates its dramatic energy. He observes that the Irish “otherness” reflects an anxious obsession with self-representation that originated with the colonial and postcolonial condition of the country.1 Grene’s thesis prompts the consideration of how Irish American drama represents itself. Is there an Irish American otherness? What is its relationship to the mainstream of American drama, and how does it interact with other ethnic American drama? Grene also considers the representation of life, the gap in social milieu between characters and between characters and audience, observing that Irish playwrights have looked to social margins for settings among the deprived and impoverished from Sean O’Casey’s tenement dwellers to Marina Carr’s Hester Swayne in By the Bog of Cats. Where do Irish American playwrights find their characters and themes for their dramas of Irish American public and private life? While the Irish characters live at the margins of Irish society and, in the course of the drama, usually lose their fragile hold on the margin, Irish American characters may be marginalized by religion or ethnicity, but they have a relationship with the American mainstream through the world of work, the defining force in the Irish American experience that offered the chance for immigrants to redefine themselves.2 Want of work in Ireland was part of the legacy of colonialism. Jonathan Swift’s The Drapier Letters and 20 | m a u r e e n m u r p h y “A Modest Proposal” are the eighteenth-century indictments of the colonial suppression of native industry. Nineteenth-century prefamine travelers’ accounts provide anecdotal impressions not only of the want of work among those barely surviving but also of the negative stereotypes that had developed about the under or unemployed. In Ireland’s Welcome to the Stranger (1847), Asenath Nicholson described the cycle of poverty and hopelessness. Taking a walk far out of town [Bandon, Co. Cork], I went into a miserable cabin where two women and their two daughters were at their wheels and a third old woman carding. This was an unusual sight, for seldom had I seen, in Ireland, a whole family employed among the peasantry. Ages of poverty have taken everything out of their hands but preparing and eating the potato; and they sit listlessly upon a stool, lie upon their straw or saunter upon the street because nobody hires them.3 Those coming to America had the possibility to remake themselves through work. In addition to looking at work as the transforming experience, particularly in the earlier drama, I will also look at the themes and characters that are unique to Irish American drama: the urban political play and the treatment of second generation Irish caught between the claims of family, particularly parents, and their opportunity to develop their own lives. First, some history. The Irish who came to America, even those who arrived before the Great Irish Famine of 1845–52, came without a highly developed native drama. There are dramatic elements in early and medieval Irish literature like the dialogues between Oisin and Patrick in the Fenian cycle. Speaking of these early dialogues, Máire Mhac an tSaoi once made the intriguing suggestion that if there were an early dramatist who, like Aeschylus, could add a third voice, that drama could have developed from dialogues. Instead, drama in the conventional sense developed in Ireland as the result of English influence, a cultural colonialism that came with the spread of the English language and with the growth of towns. There was almost no theatrical activity outside of Dublin in the seventeenth and early eighteen century, and in Dublin, even the Smock Alley Theater who produced its first play, William Philip’s St. Stephen’s Green; or, the Generous Lover in 1699 or 1700, did not encourage the development of native drama but instead offered traveling productions from the London stage to their Ascendancy audiences.4 From Scapegrace to Grásta | 21 During the nineteenth century, the Irish living in larger country towns were introduced to theater through visits of...