Review: The Silver Tassie

Lincoln Centre's The Silver Tassie, performed by the Ireland-based Druid Theatre, hit home on many levels. Though the play does not have a solid plot line - it is more a series of brief snapshots of several characters from an Irish town during World War I - it managed to draw out feelings I had not felt for quite some time. With my very casual and brief knowledge of expressionist theater, where the play is supposed to express a feeling, the scenes certainly created a mood and tone for these events. Like all good theater, and good art, it helped me to glimpse into the head of someone else and feel for a moment what they might be feeling.

We are introduced to the inhabitants of a small Irish town, where Harry the rugby player has just won the prize cup (silver tassie), celebrating with his friends, best girl Jessie, family, and neighborhood wife-beater. No, not the shirt.

The play almost felt like a musical, particularly in the second act. Every few minutes, the dialogue was punctuated with songs, short scraps of folk songs and music. Many of the songs, sung by soldiers waiting to be sent to the front, asked "Why are we here?", while others memorialized the dead or made fun of a prissy soldier. Without the music, the play would have not had the same force in any degree.

The play was a hodgepodge of what can only be very true snapshots of real life. There were contradictions, such as a chilling prayer sung to God and to the larger-than-stage tank which took the scene. In the aftermath of the war, the protagonist was left in a wheelchair and the wife-beater blind; their roles and positions in society were completely reversed, yet none of the fellow characters sympathized with them as broken - but still full, feeling - people. The play was very, very bitter.

Sound like a lot to take in all at once? At times, it was, particularly while getting used to the words and cadence of the Irish tongues, but the play's pacing was slow enough to let a thick audience member like me follow. And indeed, some heavy themes were casually thrown on stage. Because the characters took such things in stride, the audience was forced to, too - rather unwillingly.

But from the mother holding her son's empty coat in front of him before he goes to war, to the dismissive cruelty of a former lover, to the final scene where the blind man wheels his paralyzed friend home away from the swinging party, this play elicited a sense of injustice, suffering and pain. Of course, there were the lighter moments, too, of soldiers knocking cups on their helmets and rear ends making fun of war, but I thought this play gave me a cold, hard look at who and what humans are: careless, selfish, broken, and contradictory.

It was painful, beautiful, ugly, and brilliant all at once.