Soon, Michael Flaherty comes in with his friends, Jimmy Farrell and Philly O’Cullen. Pegeen is exasperated that Shawn was too cowardly to investigate. Pegeen berates him for being so god-fearing, and Shawn makes things worse when he lets slip that, on his way over, he heard what sounded like a young man “groaning wicked like a maddening dog” in a ditch. Shawn is too afraid of what the local priest, Father Reilly, would think if he were to stay overnight with Pegeen, especially as he needs permission from the priest to approve their wedding between cousins. When Shawn comes into the pub, Pegeen tells him of her worry of being left alone in the pub all night-her father, the pub owner Michael Flaherty, is going to be at a wake. The pub’s young barmaid, Margaret Flaherty, better known as Pegeen Mike, is making a list of items she needs for her upcoming wedding to Shawn Keogh, her second cousin. Always convincingly earnest and naive, Jim True makes a credible and charming Christy (one can easily believe that any number of folks would be taken in by this young fellow’s blarney).The Playboy of the Western World takes place in a run-down pub in the countryside of the North West of Ireland in the early 1900s. Happily, the director is more successful with his lead players. It’s as if Hughes started out determined to strip away the sentimental nonsense that often surrounds the play but did not quite know what to do with the rest of his production budget. The music and design provide moments of intriguing resonance (Karin Kopischke’s costumes are no-nonsense pieces of historical re-creation), but one is always aware of a mix of styles. Once the clouds have burst, Hughes has a besuited Irish band perched uncomfortably atop Pegeen Mike’s place, providing extra-terrestrial commentary on the antics below of the young man who may or may not have killed his Da.
But Stewart also provides a theatrical flourish in the form of torrential rainfall. Eschewing thatched roofs and other quaint artifacts of the typical themed Irish environment, set designer Anita Stewart has created the kind of dead-accurate low-rise public house that would delight an historian more than it does an audience looking for imaginative staging. Starting at the Steppenwolf before moving to the Long Wharf Theater for a fall sojourn, Hughes’ production is also a strange mix of grand spectacle and mean realism.
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