‘Ulster American’ Is a Bawdy Send Up of Progressive Pieties — and an Irreverent Inquiry Into Irishness

‘Ulster American,’ at the redoubtable Irish Repertory Theater through the first week in May, is a refreshingly twisted take on a set of questions too often performed in an earnest key. That is not to say that it is a great play — its early focus on upending pities gives way too thoroughly to farce — but at its best its humor is that of a rambunctious wake. Written in 2018 by David Ireland, it gives attention to a Northern Irish identity often given short shrift.The play features three characters. Leigh Carver (Max Baker) is a mandarin playwright with impeccable socialist credentials. Jay Conway (Matthew Broderick) is an Oscar-winning Irish-American actor, is in Alcoholics Anonymous, and is decidedly not a rocket scientist. Carver is counting on him to deliver his theater troupe to glory. Ruth Davenport (Geraldine Hughes) is a playwright from Belfast. Her biography and affiliations match Mr. Ireland’s. Mr. Ireland asks in his playbill note “Was I even Irish? I was born into a working-class Protestant family in Belfast, unflinchingly loyal to the British crown. Growing up I had an antipathy to Irish culture because to me it represented the people who were trying to kill us.” By 1996, he writes, “thanks to Riverdance and U2 and the Cranberries, Irishness was suddenly the coolest thing ever. But I didn’t want to be cool. I was born British, and I would die British.”That’s Davenport’s position, which puts her productively at odds with both Carver and Conway. The actor, played with a kind of Bueller bozo-ness by Mr. Broderick, can’t wrap his head around someone from what he calls the “North of Ireland” that doesn’t think of herself as Irish — and is Protestant to boot. Carver, for all of his leftist leanings — his support for the Palestinians is impeccable — finds Ulster hardly British at all.For Carver, the “disastrous environment of the post-Brexit disaster” is the preeminent issue. One of the play’s ironies is that the Belfastian Davenport is, to adopt the phrase, “more British than the British” — she voted for Brexit, declares “I don’t like the European Union,” and anyway reckons that a “play isn’t going to reverse Brexit.” To that Carver explodes “You’re not even British…You shouldn’t even have a vote on Brexit!”Brexit is hardly the only hot button issue that is mashed. The play, directed by Ciarán O’Reilly, begins with a discussion of a racial epithet and proceeds to an uncomfortable conversation around rape, even if it is hypothetically framed. When Davenport learns, to her horror, of this bawdy talk, Carver responds “you know I’m not a misogynist. I adore women. I want to be a woman.” The man, though, doth protest too much.Conway, who at one point takes his Oscar statuette out of his duffel bag as a kind of mic drop, increasingly becomes disillusioned by the delta between how he thinks of Ireland — call it the St. Patrick’s Day and Leprechaun version — and the intra-British debate that breaks out over Ulster between Davenport and Carver. The playwright tries to assuage the actor that the play “couldn’t be more Irish if it tried. ”To that Davenport insists that “I’m not Irish. I’m British.” The play becomes increasingly acrimonious, with Davenport telling Conway that he sounds like “a Belfast Dick Van Dyke.” To which Carver responds that “It’s unlikely anyone from Belfast will ever hear about this play.” The suave and cultured Carver responds to the escalating tensions by exclaiming “This is what Marx would term praxis. Just imagine what Brecht would make of this conversation.”The play’s most rousing oration belongs to Davenport, and it is an aria in praise of, among all things, the British Army, which she lauds for its stance during the Troubles against “one of the world’s most well organised, well-funded ruthless terrorist machines” — the Irish Republican Army. She adds that the IRA was “funded, I might add, in large part, by wealthy Irish Americans” — like the actor standing slack-jawed beside her. Mr. Ireland writes that “it’s benefited my career that the bien pensants of London see me as Irish, but the truth is the older I get, and the longer I stay away from Belfast, the more British I feel.” The play’s greatest virtue is that it scrambles the conventional clichés of identity politics into a stranger brew. As Mr. Ireland puts it, “Maybe I’m a British citizen and an Irish writer. Or maybe that’s having my soda bread and eating it too.”

‘Ulster American’ Is a Bawdy Send Up of Progressive Pieties — and an Irreverent Inquiry Into Irishness

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