Mint Theater
New York
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Sometimes it takes a rediscovered 1932 drama to remind us “how poverty intrudes on morality,” said Neil Genzlinger in The New York Times. In its ongoing effort to revive the works of the once-acclaimed Irish playwright Teresa Deevy, the Mint Theater has unearthed a potent story about an impoverished couple in post-partition Ireland. Newly evicted tenant farmers Min and Michael Donovan find a large packet of stolen money stashed in the ruins of a stone house. This drives a wedge between the two: “Michael recognizes immediately that these are surely ill-gotten goods, but Min is more in a finders-keepers frame of mind.” He plans to hand the cash over to the local priest, while she wants to use it to emigrate to America.
Soon the whole village gets involved, and “the cash causes nothing but grief for anyone who touches it,” said Erik Haagensen in Backstage. Yet this play offers no straightforward lessons. Rosie Benton’s Min eventually betrays her husband and gets her comeuppance, but she’s never once shown to be wrong in her belief that enforced poverty is so immoral that it entitles her to the found money. And Michael’s insistence on returning it is less a product of integrity than of “his unquestioning devotion to the Catholic Church.” Aidan Redmond makes Michael a worthy foil for Min: He’s resigned to his fate and “yet equipped with a submerged capacity for violence.”
All this is conveyed in an earthy vernacular full of “unfamiliar sentence structure and poetic idioms,” said Marilyn Stasio in Variety. “What was on me that I ever took up with you?” says Min, berating her husband for their penniless state. “I am lookin’ for that answer day an’ night.” Remarkably, “this lyrical language was written by a woman who had been deaf since the age of 20.” Deevy, despite her disability, obviously still possessed in her late 30s an acute ear for the language and the problems of her country’s dispossessed. Her characters are people “so rubbed raw by poverty that it’s hard to condemn them for selling out their communal values for a succulent potato.”
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