As rehearsals for a new play are about to start in London, the show’s lead actor, Jay (Matthew Broderick), is eager to meet the playwright, Ruth, at last. But Ruth is flying from her home in Belfast and running late, so Jay and the show’s director, Leigh (Max Baker), end up shooting the breeze.
Jay is a Hollywood star, so of course he’s in recovery, of course acting is his religion, and of course he has an Academy Award, which, he claims, “means nothing to me.” By way of explanation, he adds, “I’ve never sought external validation.”
Conversely, the craven Leigh is discombobulated by his sudden proximity to American-style confidence and flash — when Jay makes a reference to “Baldwin” in a discussion about using the N-word, Leigh assumes he’s talking about Alec rather than James.
In the early scenes of “Ulster American,” at Irish Repertory Theater, the playwright David Ireland is toying with fairly standard — but reliably amusing — stereotypes and culture clashes. The two men banter agreeably, with Jay sketched out as a pseudo-boundary-pusher who asks questions like “Do you think there are any circumstances where it’s morally acceptable to rape someone?”
At this point in the play, Ireland is not so much shaping characters as burying land mines, which will start detonating when Ruth (Geraldine Hughes) eventually turns up. Let’s just say that by the end of Ciaran O’Reilly’s production, the fight director, Rick Sordelet, will have earned his fee.
Like Ireland’s “Cyprus Avenue,” which ran at the Public Theater in 2018, “Ulster American” explores issues of identity related to Irishness and Britishness. The two shows share explosive endings, though the earlier work is a bleak tragedy — the lead character, a bigoted Belfast Unionist, is convinced his infant grandchild is the Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams, and the consequences are horrifying. “Ulster American,” for its part, is very much a dark comedy.
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