Fishamble: The New Play Company from Dublin, Ireland will perform the American premiere of "Noah and the Tower Flower" by Sean McLoughlin, winner of the 2007 Irish Times Best New Play Award, September 7 to October 2, 2011 at The Drilling Company Theater, 236 West 78th Street, Manhattan. The award-winning play is one of the most acclaimed productions of the ensemble, which produces only new works and is regarded as the most courageous and innovative theatre company in the country. It is an affecting portrait of the "lost youth" of Ballymun, a blighted, hardscrabble district of North Dublin, ringing with the quarter's exotic language and illuminated by inspiring performances. Artistic director Jim Culleton will direct the play with its original cast.
The production is presented by Fishamble in association with The Drilling Company as part of Imagine Ireland, Culture Ireland's year of Irish arts in America, and 1st Irish, New York's annual festival of Irish Theatre.
"Noah and the Tower Flower" is a powerful, tender portrait of the "lost generation" of twenty-somethings who grew up in the high-rises of Ballymun, the Irish state's worst urban planning disaster. Ballymun is a district on Dublin's North Side, near the airport. The Ballymun flats, intended to replace slums with high-rise apartments, were built in the idealism of the late '60s. Largely due to its lack of amenities, the area deteriorated in the '70s and '80s into a rough and violent ghetto, known for its poverty, drugs and alienation. Today, it is a scene of a multi-billion euro program of urban renewal.
The play is an encounter between two memorable fictional characters of this milieu. Noah, recently released from jail, is a reckless yet interestingly perceptive young man with a violent past. On his first day of freedom, he encounters Natalie, a recovering addict, who is soaking up gin and tonics in a neighborhood bar. He dubs her a "Tower Flower," a sobriquet that is destined to enter popular parlance with the increasing popularity of this play. The duo are high-strung and ferociously attracted to each other. The sympathetic, ultimately uplifting drama depicts their struggle to leave their pasts behind as they begin to fall in love. It is distinguished by its peculiar, soaring argot and the performances of its two distinguished actors, who feel the characters in their bones.
The play is set in the bar and Natalie's apartment, two intimate locations that are well-suited to The Drilling Company's jewel-box theater. This production marks the beginning of an alliance between Ireland's most prolific presenter of new plays and a rising New York company that is totally committed to presenting new work in its theater space on the Upper West Side. (In the summer, however, it produces "old" works: Shakespeare in the Park(ing) Lot on the Lower East Side).
The play stands out among the nine productions of this year's 1st Irish festival by the number of accolades in its portfolio. Beside winning the Best New Play Award 2007 in the Irish Times Theatre Awards, it is winner of the overall Stewart Parker Trust Award 2007 and was nominated for a Playwrights' and Screenwriters' Guild ZeBBie Award (formerly OZ Whitehead Award) for Best Theatre Script in 2007. The Sunday Independent wrote, "It's a little cracker...Mary Murray and Darren Healy are as funny, endearing and accomplished as could be hoped for...Jim Culleton directs with a great touch of liveliness and subtlety." The Irish Independent declared, "Sean McLoughlin has written a fairytale of Ballymun with all The Edge of Shane MacGowan's New York version...Mary Murray is stunning as Natalie; Darren Healy brings physical comedy, a manic energy and a superb De Niro impersonation to his portrayal of Noah...Jim Culleton has clearly allowed the actors to nurse their characters into life...exhilarating, clever and disturbing." The Irish Times praised McLoughlin's keen eye for character and amusingly blunt dialogue. The Sunday Business Post, rating the play four stars, wrote, "McLoughlin convincingly captures the desperation of obsession, addiction, loneliness and love, in a Dublin idiom laced with mordant humour. Darren Healy and Mary Murray make the intimacy of Fishamble's production almost difficult to watch...the snappy Dublin banter in McLoughlin's play is beautiful, hard poetry."
