Terminus (review)

In 2011, the Irish government funded an initiative called "Imagine Ireland," bringing some 400 cultural events to forty US states. These events were meant to spark interest in Irish arts and culture, while shaping the ways in which Americans think about Ireland and Irish culture, broadly defined. Supported by this initiative, the Abbey Theatre's tour of playwright/ director Mark O'Rowe's Terminus represented a bold programming choice. The play is hard-hitting, containing vivid descriptions of back-room abortions, brutal murders, domestic violence, demons, angels, and graphic sex; it is dark, heavy, and frightening. At the Wexner Center, Terminus featured a highly stylized text, moving performances by committed actors, and an elegant design. While the Imagine Ireland project provided funding and visibility for the production, the brilliance of Terminus in the context of this worldwide outreach project was the way in which the play complicated the very ways in which audiences "imagine" contemporary Ireland.

The play itself was written in a style that has become increasingly familiar lately, particularly in Irish theatre: the serial monologue. Terminus contained three stories, each told by a different narrator in rotation, in smaller, interrelated narrative pieces. These narrators, named A, B, and C, addressed the audience directly and recounted events from the course of a single epic day. A, played by Olwen Fouéré, was a woman on a mission to save the life of the unborn child of one of her former students. B, played by Catherine Walker, was a young woman experiencing demons and angels during the last moments of her own life following a fall from a construction-site crane. C, played by Declan Conlon, was a painfully shy serial killer who sold his soul to the devil for the ability to sing, and thus, he hopes, to find true love.

While the Irish serial monologue was familiar in style, hearkening back to Brian Friel's Faith Healer, Conor McPherson's This Lime Tree Bower and Port Authority, Elaine Murphy's Little Gem, and Enda Walsh's Disco Pigs, the comparisons between these and O'Rowe's piece end there. Yes, Terminus is Irish—profoundly so. It is set in Dublin at the end of the Celtic Tiger era, as evidenced by the host of cranes peppering the skyline in the text's narrative. The characters are all Irish, and the playwright certainly comments on contemporary Irish political issues like abortion. The writing itself, however, makes Terminus unique. While all of the other plays mentioned above are rather poetic, O'Rowe's play is not only written in verse—a free and rollicking verse—but also in rhyme. The rhyme scheme is irregular, sometimes offering a discernable pattern, but most often planting a rhyme in ways meant to surprise.

This heightened language at various times calls attention to the words spoken by the characters (putting the words themselves directly in front of the audience), and at other times is jarring enough to provide a bit of comic relief (a forced rhyme calling attention to itself). While this rhyme and verse felt unusual and a bit unnerving, they were terribly engaging to hear in a contemporary play. In lines like "This Samaritan shit's the pits, I think," it was also very clear that the inhabitants of Terminus were not bound by the linguistic contours of the naturalized world, but rather existed in a world of imagination. An additional upshot of this intense rhyme scheme devoid of any pattern was the continuation of the thematic perpetuation of momentum. Throughout much of the play, the rhyme dictated tempo, driving the language and the story forward toward unavoidable destruction.

Olwen Fouéré ("A"), Declan Conlon ("C"), and Catherine Walker ("B") in Terminus. (Photo: Chris Sweda, courtesy of the Chicago Tribune.)

Visually, Terminus was set in a sort of limbo. Thanks to the brilliant scenic design by Jon Bausor (who also designed the costumes), lighting by Philip Gladwell, and sound by Philip Stewart, the production...