John Millington Synge? Those Americans who've heard of him (and not that many have) tend to think of the early 20th century writer as a spinner of tales about coarse or quaint Irish folk who speak in a barely decipherable tongue.
Garry Hynes is out to prove there's much more to Synge than that. Hynes, one of Ireland's leading directors, and her Galway-based ensemble, Druid Theatre Company, have spent more than three decades exposing what she calls "the absolute purity and ferocity of vision" of this oft-misunderstood playwright.
The Druids began life by mounting his best known work, "The Playboy of the Western World," in 1975. Seven years later they created a groundbreaking production that illuminates the rawness at the heart of a piece traditionally sentimentalized or played for laughs.
The company's greatest triumph came three years ago with "DruidSynge," in which the author's six plays were presented in one day -- a feat distinguished by the cast's soulful acting, not to mention endurance, and the director's fearlessness in pursuit of the real Synge. "We want people to look at him as a modern writer," Hynes said, "full of irony and parody and complex ideas" -- and intrigued, like many Irish artists, with the precarious balance between humor and tragedy, life and death.
Now the Druids are bringing Synge to Los Angeles. Their double bill -- the full-length "Playboy" preceded by the one-act "The Shadow of the Glen" -- opens tonight as part of UCLA Live's seventh International Theatre Festival. The two morality-mortality plays fit together nicely. In "Playboy," a stranger tries to charm a little town by claiming he killed his father. In "Shadow," a tramp happens onto an isolated farm where a man has just died -- or so his wife thinks. Trouble abounds once the corpse pops back to life.
"Too often, 'Playboy' is done as a period piece with comic caricatures instead of full-blooded people," Hynes said. " 'Shadow' is a really powerful piece in relation to a woman's need to be an individual and to follow her instincts. In that way it's like the plays of Ibsen."
It also is among the works for which Synge borrowed from both folk tales and everyday life. (He said he did research by eavesdropping on servant girls.) "On the stage," he once explained, "one must have reality, and one must have joy."
