Review by James Wilkinson
‘the smuggler’ – Written and directed by Ronan Noone. Scenic Design: Adam Hawkins. Lighting Design: Amanda Fallon. Sound Design: Stephanie Lynn Yackovetsky. Costume Design: Emily Keebler. Properties Design: Cayenne Douglass. Dramaturg: Caity-Shea Violette. Presented by Boston Playwrights’ Theatre at 949 Commonwealth Ave., Boston through November 24
Boston Playwrights’ Theatre’s production of the smuggler comes at you from across the room with a mischievous wink, the kind that says “Don’t worry folks. I know it all looks dark and gloomy in here, but we’re going to have a good time.” You might be a little apprehensive when it makes a move on you from the other end of the bar, but after it cracks a few jokes and flashes that smile, down goes your guard. Having sensed an opening, the smuggler snags the next bar stool over while offering to buy you a drink and you think, “Well…what the hell?” I’m not sure the mischief the original wink promises ever quite materializes, but damned if I didn’t have that good time while slinging back a few in its company. The production is too damn smooth to turn down.
I think that smoothness ends up working both for and against the production. The play, written and directed by Ronan Noone, is a tightly constructed piece of writing that, while chock full of plenty to admire, may be a bit too polished for its own good. You can’t mistake its aims because it spells it out for you in giant block letters. That’s not a deal-breaker though and the production is easily worth recommending. I had been looking forward to seeing the smuggler for a while, having been a fan of Noone’s previous Boston Playwrights’ offering, The Atheist. Georgia Lyman practically lit the stage on fire with her performance in that play and I thought that the script was an interesting descent into certain kinds of moral quagmires. Like The Atheist, the smuggler is a play for one actor, a monologue that looks to take one person’s story and turn it into an investigation of something in the wider culture. That’s pretty much where the similarities end.
Our main character here is Tim Finnegan (Billy Meleady), an Irish immigrant living in America (it’s unclear at first what time period the piece is set in, but the existence of cell phones eventually points to somewhere around the present day). Tim has dreams (or perhaps they’re delusions) of being a writer. Perhaps he’d make it if he was on his own, but with a wife and small son to support, it doesn’t look likely. The trio live in dump of an apartment with Tim’s wife (and her family) pushing Tim to get the money so that they can move into their own house. Tim’s current job has him painting houses, making barely enough to survive, so the idea of the family buying property seems like little more than a pipe dream. Given that the show runs a brisk seventy minutes, I risk giving the whole game away if I reveal much more of the plot. I’ll simply leave it saying that Tim soon stumbles across a way of bringing in the money, one that takes advantage of the undocumented immigrant community in his town.
You wouldn’t guess it when you first walk into the theater, but much of the play is actually quite light on its feet. Designer Adam Hawkins’ set puts us in the basement of what looks like a neglected building. The red brick walls stretch high above us, covered in dark stains of soot or maybe mold. When Meleady enters into this pit, coming down the staircase that leads to the unseen street, it’s the first visual clue that we’ll be descending along with the character. The lighting provided by designer Amanda Fallon practically turns the set into an interrogation room. Stark lighting hits our main character from every angle, sending his shadow all over the walls around him. But before we get there, there’s quite a bit of humor in the piece. Even as the play starts to creep into darker territory, there are humorous side plots and moments of levity to bring the audience in.
Noone gives the play a very classical structure which includes the challenge of writing Tim Finnegan’s story in rhyming verse. I’ve seen other reviews of the play that claim that after a while this element of the show falls into the background for the audience (in other words, you stop noticing it). I’d argue that that’s not quite true. While listening you occasionally find yourself being knocked off balance by an individual rhyme that strikes the ear as a bit too cute. I didn’t mind it, though, because I think that noticing the verse is part of the point (I mean, why put in the work if we’re not meant to notice it?). The structure is what gives the play its epic edge, encouraging us to widen the scope of our view. We’re not just looking at the story of a single character, we’re looking at how his story is indicative of the society around him. But while the chosen form gives the play some glue and although the tightness of the work allows you admire the craft at play, I do think that there are limits to this kind of adherence to structure that the smuggler runs up against. For one, you can practically graph Tim’s rise and fall from grace in the story as he goes along his arc. That doesn’t mean that you can’t enjoy it (again, it’s frequently enjoyable), but it prevents the play from developing a sense of spontaneity or a sense that the character is going to surprise us.
Where this production does end up generating some spontaneity is in its lead actor, Billy Meleady, who’s wonderful in the role. You can sense a joy for the act of storytelling radiating off of him. While directly addressing the audience, his body curves forward, encroaching us to lean in and hear everything that he has to say. Once he has us, he pushes on with all the force of a locomotive. The man seemed incapable of staying still for more than two seconds throughout the entire evening. He seems to be in a constant state of motion, as though if he were to pause or hold his arm in the same position for too long, the electricity would stop generating and the whole thing would collapse. And who knows? Maybe it would. But even as the sweat begins to run down his face, Meleady doesn’t let up, bringing a lot of charisma and fun to what he’s doing.
Late in the play, our lead character waves off some of his unsavory actions by reminding us that in America, you do what you need to do to get ahead (and there are those big block letters I referred to earlier). If you were to read those words out of context, “In America, you do what you need to do to get ahead,” you might be forgiven for thinking them words of generic encouragement and can-do spirit. In the smuggler they’re symptomatic of something much more rotten, a la The Godfather. Tim Finnegan gets ahead in life and others get ground to dust under the wheels of his process. As he skips up the basement steps to his new life, we’re left to ask, “Well, was it worth it?” For tickets and more information, visit their website: www.bostonplaywrights.org
