Gathering stones together

“It isn’t just the quaint dialect and the ‘fecks’ that define an Irish play,” says Joe Hilsee, artistic director of the Blue Room Theatre and one of the stars of its newest production, Stones in his Pockets. Written by Marie Jones, who was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1951, Stones is laced with the hope of overturning prejudice and violence. Working in Belfast in the ‘70s, Jones co-founded a company of unemployed actresses, and it is through the struggles she experienced that her plays get their sense of righteous indignation.

Paul Stout, a co-founder of the seminal Chico group Theatre Out of a Suitcase, and Hilsee play on the tiny black-box stage, with just a few coats and hats, most of the community of an Irish town in County Kerry. With minimal set design and an excellent wall mural, by director Amber Miller, Hilsee and Stout transform and emerge as 15 different characters over the course of the two-hour play. Though Miller looked pensive at first on opening night, by intermission she knew she had created a solid, brilliant, production.

The parallels between Ireland and America, and especially Northern California, run deep. We are both tight-knit farming communities who all have second cousins in jail or on drugs. And Chico, with its recent up-grading as a home to terrorists, might even be compared to Belfast. It’s funny and sad, though Hilsee doesn’t necessarily believe in comedy and tragedy. He believes in good stories that allow you to look at what’s in the closet. “Rattle the skeletons, face your fears and laugh.”

When asked why the Blue Room always includes Irish theater in its season, Hilsee answered, “Some of the best theater is coming out of Ireland. Ireland has led the way in literature for over a hundred years: Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett and James Joyce. We have done four of the Martin McDonagh plays [including The Leenane Trilogy; The Beauty Queen of Leenane, A Skull in Connemara and The Lonesome West]. As an audience member it’s very hard to pinpoint whether you’ve seen a comedy or a serious drama. The Irish mindset is that the world’s fucked, and that they have to somehow persevere. And within this, the Irish have a wonderful tradition of story telling, so all of the plays coming out of Ireland have a great sense of story that I don’t see happening in American or English theater. American theater panders to many diverse segments, but the Irish theater has stories that are accessible to all the different castes, or levels, of society.”

The Blue Room Theatre, much like the citizens in County Kerry, is also trying to survive in a small agricultural town. One reason is that the Blue Room’s history is to take on challenging subjects and engage the audience. On any given night there’s more at risk on the Blue Room stage than on any stage in town. And if, as Hilsee says, the audience is going to be expected to do some work, then Stones in his Pockets makes the case that, not only is the work worth it, but within it is the chance to reclaim one’s community.