“Translations,” written by Brian Fiel and directed by JoJo Ruf (Col ‘08), is a solid tale of Irish identity with a little bit of fun and a great deal of soliloquy.
It is the first student production to be staged in the Davis Center since it was built last year.
Set in 1833 in an Irish-speaking community in County Donegal, the play follows its rural-school characters through an invasion of Anglicanism and its effects on the culturally isolated community.
The school, run by the articulate Master Hugh (Jason Hibner, COL ’07), and his convincingly Irish son, Manus (Andrew Dolan (COL ’10) is the gathering place for a group of country pupils who have a bizarre knowledge of Greek and Latin.
Laura Stewart (COL ’09) is Bridget, a convincing blond ditz, and Kyle Fitzpatrick (COL ’08) is her trickster counterpart Doalty, who outdoes Hibner’s despairing monologues with intense periods of groaning.
When Yolland and his cold-hearted Captain Lancey (Mike Mitchell, COL ’10) come into town with Master Hugh’s son Owen (Alex Kostura, SFS ’09), they find a community stuck in the past, conjugating Latin verbs at their master’s command, and speaking only Gaelic.
“God! I can’t believe it!” Owen says in a daze of confusion and joy, “I come back after six years and nothing has changed.”
He rides into Country Donegal on wings of uncertain change: the British have come to map, anglicize and rename the Irish counties, in order to, as Lancey proclaims, “advance the interests of Ireland.”
But what are the interests of Ireland? The play unfolds in an attempt to tackle this question, and each character takes a stab at a definition. Manus (whose accent is the most consistent) wants Maire (Cat Groves, COL ‘08) and nothing to do with the British. Maire, on the other hand, wants change, and rather than settle for Manus falls for the enthusiastic, dashing George.
The moments in the school, while powerfully acted by Hibner, can be arduous to sit through—if the audience is not struggling to decipher the character’s accent, then they are tied in knots by Hugh’s speeches, or wondering what exactly is the deal with Maire and Manus.
However, George Yolland, given excitement and depth by Jamie Scott, might single- handedly have saved the audience and the play from Master Hugh’s endless monologues. With a British accent worthy of a BBC production, George’s awkward curiosity and love for the culture of Donegal engage and enliven the audience as well as the other characters. Despite his yellow suspenders and 19th century-pants, Scott’s character brought the play into the living world, far from Latin and Greek and closer to the issue at the heart of the play: communicating emotions in a foreign language.
Throughout the process of production, the actors have been moving in and out of foreign worlds, as they do in the play. According to actress Cat Graves, they underwent intense dialect coaching to perfect their accents. Dialect expert Susan Linsky and Professor Brian O’Neil, originally from Ireland, spoke to the cast about pronunciation and helped them develop genuine dialect.
“It’s nice if you’re having a bad day to think that ‘I can get into this world,” said Laura Stewart.
Joshua DeMinter added that the process of becoming a new character within a group of people closely mirrored the process of assimilation at Georgetown.
“There is a way that you can take the place that you are from, and preserve it,” he said, “and still be part of the Georgetown community.”
JoJo Ruf, who visited Donegal while abroad in England last semester, stressed that “Translations” is a sort of symbol for Nomadic Theater as it experiments with a new space at Georgetown. “Donegal was a place where identity was being eliminated and changed,” she said, but it still managed to have confidence in its role and its community.”
She sees this entertaining and somewhat moving production at the Davis Center as a step towards creating a stronger identity for the Nomadic program.
