Other People's Diasporas: Negotiating Race in Contemporary Irish and Irish-American Culture

3. Playing the Race Card: Staging Immigration in Irish and Irish American Drama

99 4 Playing the Race Card Staging Immigration in Irish and Irish American Drama But what happens when the fuckers get their human rights? Huh? They turn around and grab someone else’s. Oh, not right away. There’s always a decent interval ’til they get on their feet. Then they deliver the old drop-kick to the crotch of some other miserable poor bugger. —Janet Noble, Away Alone (1989) Jn Janet Noble’s play Away Alone, which opened at the Irish Arts Center in New York in December 1989, young Irish immigrants struggle with homesickness, low-paid jobs, and, for the ones without the appropriate work permits, fear of discovery by the authorities. Desmond, a particularly sensitive young man, grows despondent at feeling at home neither in the Bronx nor in Ireland, his dejection eventually leading, it is implied, to his suicide by drowning. Arguing with fellow immigrant Liam over the futility of wars, Desmond asks: “But what happens when the fuckers get their human rights?” and answers his own rhetorical question. Desmond’s claim is the direct opposite of what the historical-duty argument would hope to achieve. For him, a history of subjugation emphatically does not lead to solidarity with other oppressed peoples but results in the desire to become an oppressor in turn. This chapter interrogates the validity of Desmond’s statement by examining two interventions in debates on race and immigration on the Irish and Irish American stage. In Ronan Noone’s The Blowin of Baile Gall (2002) and Donal O’Kelly’s 100 • “Other People’s Diasporas” “The Cambria” (2005), Ireland’s colonial past is invoked in order, in the first case, to explain or even justify the ill-treatment of nonwhite immigrants to Ireland and, in the second, to appeal to a collective Irish conscience regarding immigrants based on the historical memory of colonialism and emigration. While issues of globalization have dominated discussions of Irish theater for some time now, only one scholar has devoted himself consistently to unpacking stage representations of one of its chief consequences : immigration.1 In such representations, Jason King finds that the historical-duty argument is pervasive. He argues that Irish theater, more than any other artistic or cultural form, “has served to provide a vehicle and a venue for . . . the staging of spectacles of intercultural contact, in which the interconnections between immigrant perceptions and Irish historical memory have become dramatized as a recurrent narrative conceit” (2005, 24). While King’s work serves to draw attention to the diversity of Irish dramatic treatments of race and immigration, the six productions on which he focuses are not mainstream. As he acknowledges, his readings of them are based on “mainly unpublished scripts” (26). They thus form a counternarrative to the dominant mode of contemporary Irish drama that is still preoccupied with the Irish emigrant experience and not, like The Blowin of Baile Gall, in a way that juxtaposes “New Irish” with “New Irish.” As Margaret Llewellyn-Jones observes, “A key figure in Irish drama is either the individual who decides on exile, or the family member whose return visit from abroad acts as a catalyst, challenging the identities and lifestyles of those who have stayed at home” (2002, 119; Trotter 2008, 184). She goes on to discuss no fewer than thirteen Irish plays, most of them staged in the 1990s and beyond, that dramatize these events. While King’s observations on the receptiveness of Irish theater to intercultural interactions are insightful, then, it is also crucial to recognize that plays about Irish emigrant or returned emigrant subjects by high-profile 1. For an overview of globalization debates in Irish theater, see Lanters 2005. Playing the Race Card • 101 and award-winning dramatists such as Brian Friel, Frank McGuinness , Tom Murphy, and Martin McDonagh continue to dominate the mainstream Irish stage. For Shaun Richards, meanwhile, King’s point regarding the receptiveness of Irish theater, in particular, to the dramatization of immigrant experiences is “moot” because except for these six plays, “what the contemporary Irish theatre has certainly done most successfully is capture some of the surface of social change, albeit often in plays whose superficiality accords with, rather than penetrates, the society they purport to examine” (2007, 9). In other words, Richards worries that the majority of plays staged in Ireland during the Celtic Tiger years depict the malaise of “latte-drinking” middleclass (their whiteness is implied, though not...