Reviving Teresa Deevy

I wrote thsi feature for the Aug. 28, 2011 issue of The Living Church Magazine.

She had six plays produced at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre in six years in the 1930s. When her seventh met with rejection, she began writing for radio, despite having been deaf since 19, the result of Meniere’s disease developed several years earlier. In 1954 she was elected to the prestigious Irish Academy of Letters. The Irish Times called her one of the most significant Irish playwrights of the 20th century. Yet few people in Ireland today and even fewer in America know the name of Teresa Deevy.

The Mint Theater Company, an award-winning Off-Broadway theatre, is tackling that obscurity with its two-year Teresa Deevy Project, producing three of her plays as well as offering readings, recordings and publications.

“I found her because I asked the question ‘Who were the women writing plays in the first 50 years of the Abbey?’” said Jonathan Bank, the Mint’s artistic director. “I began with the perception that the history of theatre in Ireland was a lot of men and then, oh, yeah, there was Lady Gregory.”

He found that other women’s plays had been produced, but only Deevy’s had been published, and then only a few.

“What gets remembered and produced is a little bit arbitrary,” he said, adding that if people haven’t heard of a work they assume it wasn’t good in the first place. “That’s not a great measure of talent of the playwright and the worth of the play, but once that idea gets set it’s hard to overcome, which is why we’re trying to throw as much muscle as we have behind her.”

Bank began his latest resurrection effort — the Mint’s mission is to find lost or forgotten work and restore it to mint condition — last summer when he directed Wife to James Whelan, the play rejected by the Abbey in 1937. Its critically acclaimed run at the Mint was extended for as long as the space was available.

This summer Bank is directing Temporal Powers, a moving story of Michael and Min Donovan, a couple whose love has been strained by years of poverty. That love is pushed to the limits after they are evicted from their home and take refuge in a crumbling ruin, where they find a large sum of money buried within the walls and end up bitterly divided over the morality of keeping it. Michael says it doesn’t belong to them and that their poverty must be God’s will. Min sees it differently.

“’Tis the hand of God I see in this as clear as me own,” she says. “A wonder but you’d see! What would it be but the Providence of God looking down on his poor children and they destitute.”

Bank thinks the argument is Deevy’s way of “really attacking the question of what should the Church be doing about poverty.”

What Bank finds in all of Deevy’s work is a deep spirituality rooted in her Roman Catholic upbringing. Deevy was born in 1894 in Waterford as one of 13 children. She died in 1963.

“She was a devout, daily Mass-attending Catholic,” Bank said. She also made yearly pilgrimages to Lourdes as a stretcher-bearer for the sick, and on a trip to Rome had an audience with the pope. Her plays, however, offer no moral certitude.

“She posses a question but doesn’t resolve it,” he says.

In Temporal Powers, which plays through Oct. 2, it’s “the eternal question of salvation.”

“She does not come down on one side or the other,” he says. “She makes a really balanced argument and we’re left to make that decision ourselves. That’s true of all her work. You can’t quite find her point of view.”

Wife’s rejection by the Abbey after six straight years of acceptance can be attributed to political factors, Bank said, mentioning the new Irish constitution of 1937 that made it illegal for married women to work. The prevailing atmosphere would have been unfavorable to a woman playwright, even one who wasn’t married.

That her plays are unknown now is because so few of them were published. The Mint will publish her collected works in two volumes. The first will be released in August or September, with the second to follow next year, and will be available through the theatre’s website (www.minttheater.org).

“She had a profound insight into human behavior, human psychology,” Bank said.

In preparing to launch the Teresa Deevy Project, Bank made his first visit to Ireland to meet with her family and study her writings, which were heaped in boxes with no filing system. Wife to James Whelan had disappeared for 40 years because it had been misfiled. Pages from some plays were missing, rendering them useless for production. Her family told him stories of her life and allowed him to copy her work.

“She was a very spiritual Catholic,” Bank says. “She took it to heart. It was not knee-jerk to her. Although her plays are to a certain extent thrashing with this issue, they don’t read as a woman without conflict. As firm as her beliefs would have been, so were her questions.”

Teresa Deevy Project

I wrote this feature for National Catholic Reporter

She had six plays produced at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre in six years in the 1930s. When her seventh met with rejection, she began writing for radio, despite having been deaf since 19, the result of Meniere's disease developed several years earlier. In 1954 she was elected to the prestigious Irish Academy of Letters. The Irish Times called her one of the most significant Irish playwrights of the 20th century. Yet few people in Ireland today and even fewer in America know the name of Teresa Deevy.

The Mint Theater Company, an award-winning Off-Broadway theatre, plans to tackle that obscurity over the next two years with its Teresa Deevy Project, which will produce two of her plays as well as offer readings, recordings and publications.

“I found her because I asked the question, ‘Who were the woman writing plays in the first 50 years of the Abbey,’” said Jonathan Bank, the Mint’s artistic director. “I began with the perception that the history of theatre in Ireland was a lot of men and then, oh, yeah, there was Lady Gregory.”

He found that other women’s plays had been produced, but only Deevy’s had been published, and then only a few.

“What gets remembered and produced is a little bit arbitrary,” he said, sitting in his midtown office one hot summer afternoon during rehearsals for Wife To James Whelan, the play rejected by the Abbey in 1937 and subsequently only produced once, in 1956 when it received a critically acclaimed production at the small but influential Studio Theatre Club in Dublin. It has never been seen anywhere since. This should not be criteria for judging the play, Bank said, but many people think if they haven’t heard of a work, it must not have been good in the first place.

“That’s not a great measure of talent of the playwright and the worth of the play, but once that idea gets set it’s hard to overcome, which is why we’re trying to throw as much muscle as we have behind her,” he said.

What Bank found in all of her work was a deep spirituality rooted in her Catholic upbringing. Born in 1894 in Waterford, Deevy, who died in 1963, was one of 13 children. Two of the seven girls became nuns, the other five never married. One of the boys was a priest, an uncle was a Jesuit. Teresa was a border at the local Ursuline school where her writing was published in the school magazine.

“She was a devout, daily Mass attending Catholic,” Bank said. She also made yearly pilgrimages to Lourdes as a stretcher-bearer for the sick, and on a trip to Rome had an audience with the Pope.

Some of her works reflects this more directly than others. The Wild Goose was about the persecution of Catholic priests in the 1690s; Supreme Dominion focuses on the 17th century Irish priest and scholar Luke Wadding. The two plays the Mint is producing -- Wife to James Whelan and Temporal Powers -- have plots that are less directly Catholic, although the characters are.

Wife, which plays through Oct. 3, is set in a small town in the middle of Ireland and tells a story of conflict between ambition and happiness as a young man must choose between the hometown woman he loves and his desire to make his mark in Dublin. The Irish Times called it “a play of tragic proportion,” likening the central character to King Lear -- “a tormented figure, passionate yet ambitious, kindly yet prone to blinding anger.” Bank thinks it will leave audiences with plenty to discuss.

“She posses a question but doesn’t resolve it,” he says.

Temporal Powers, which will be produced in 2012, presents “the eternal question of salvation,” Bank says. A couple, having lost their home, take shelter in an abandoned building where they find a great deal of money stashed in a wall. The wife wants to keep it, the husband asks what good it will do them if in keeping it they face eternal damnation. Bank expects this play to provoke much discussion as well.

“She does not come down on one side or the other,” he says of the playwright. “She makes a really balanced argument and we’re left to make that decision ourselves. That’s true of all her work. You can’t quite find her point of view.”

Wife’s rejection by the Abbey after six straight years of acceptance can be attributed to political factors, Bank said, mentioning the new Irish constitution of 1937 that made it illegal for married women to work. The prevailing atmosphere would have been unfavorable to a woman playwright, even one who wasn’t married. That her plays are unknown now is because so few of them were published. The Mint hopes to publish her collected works.

“Her people are so complex,” he said about her characters. “The world she draws us into is a bit like a novel. In two hours you come to know people in a way we’re unaccustomed to in the theatre. It’s more like the experience of reading a book.”

He credits a heightened sensitivity that she may have been born with or might have developed because of her deafness. It was her handicap that actually led her to a life in the arts. After her family sent her to London to study lip-reading she fell in love with the theater and decided to pursue a career as a playwright.

“She had a profound insight into human behavior, human psychology,” Bank said.

In preparing to launch the Teresa Deevy Project, Bank made his first visit to Ireland to meet with her family and study her writings, which were heaped in boxes with no filing system -- Wife to James Whelan had disappeared for 40 years because the envelope it was in had been misfiled. Pages from some plays were missing, rendering them useless for production. Her family told him stories of her life and allowed him to copy her work.

“She was a very spiritual Catholic,” Bank says. “She took it to heart. It was not knee-jerk to her. Although her plays are to a certain extent thrashing with this issue, they don’t read as a woman without conflict. As firm as her beliefs would have been, so were her questions.”


Related web site
www.minttheater.org

Wife To James Whelan

I was so glad to see that Teresa Deevy’s Wife To James Whelan, which opened last night at the Mint Theater, got such a great review in today’s New York Times. It would have received a rave from me if had been wearing my critic’s hat these days instead of my producer’s. I will be posting my interview with the Mint’s artistic director, Jonathan Bank, as soon as it appears in NCR.

I have never seen show at the Mint that wasn’t excellent, but this one is especially powerful. As the Times says, this production “is never less than compelling.” Hooray for the Mint for finding this forgotten play and bringing it to life. I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind since I saw it last Wednesday. Stay tuned for my interview with Jonathan that will tell you more about this play and the two-year project dedicated to Deevy, who had had much success at the Abbey in the 1930s and who is largely unknown now. That was a huge loss for generations of theatergoers. Let’s hope that thanks to the Mint’s efforts she will never be forgotten again.

(In photo, by Carol Rosegg, are Janie Brookshire and Shawn Fagan.)