As many a bleak day lay ahead, we have to remember what’s good about this part of the world. There’s information and things work. The information: Silver Spring Stage is producing a new version of John Millington Synge’s Playboy of the Western World (by Bisi Adigun & Roddy Doyle) and it’s now appearing on their stage as the first show of 2025. And it works. Directed by Seth Ghitelman, this quirky but dark comedy of incidental errors and tall tales puts a refreshing spin on the way we look at outsiders and how we value their stories.
It’s rare, particularly in community theatre, where a set can be so transformative all on its own. The moment you lay eyes on Maggie Modig’s Set Design & Paint work (augmented by McKenna Kelly’s intricately detailed set dressings and Norma Andrews’ props work) you find yourself smack in the middle of that suburban Dublin pub. The details are exacting and the authentic aesthetic crafted by Modig is so impressive that you can practically smell the stale beer and day-old whiskey reeking up from that grody tiled floor. (If you’ve ever been in a public house in the UK, any memory you have there will come slamming back at you once you lay eyes on Modig’s set.) That grody, freckled floor is painted to perfection, designed to hide a myriad of ‘pub stains’ and conceal a plethora of sins in its dingy coloration. The darker wooden wainscotting with notable crown molding around the ‘top’ of the walls, the real English dartboard and chalk-scores scribbled over; every inch of space is meticulously plotted into Modig’s grand design, from the recessed alcove to the diamond-window in the pub’s main door. Her set becomes a character all its own, one you wish could speak of all the stories it’s seen. And while we’re giving due praise, Special Effects Designer (for the working beer tap, and boy oh boy did it ever look like properly headed-Guiness) Dan Foster has more than done his due diligence to complete the look of this impressive setting.
Another exemplary praiseworthy designer on the production team is Jeff Miller creating the show’s sound effects. Miller does an exceptional job of not only creating realistic sounds but giving them the type of muffled feel that you would get if you were in a thin-walled, street-side pub. This is particularly true for whenever he cranks up the car motor (and slams the car doors) out in the alleyway. Miller’s work is well balanced and the effects are clean and believable. Align his aural soundscape with the other striking visuals in the production and you really feel like you’re going places (Dublin in particular) with this show.
Gary Sullivan (Irish Dialect Coach) and Juliana Voss (Nigerian Consultant) have exponentially elevated the quality of the production with their guidance. While one of the tertiary character actors doesn’t have a pronounced Irish accent, Sullivan and Director Seth Ghitelman have made the right call in letting him speak with his own voice rather than forcing a bad attempt on him. The remainder of the players, particularly the actors playing Pegeen and Michael have robust, but still intelligible Irish sounds that lilt through their textual deliveries, with Pegeen’s sounding county-road-rough and Michael’s sounding like a Catholic priest meets the head of the Irish mafia. And Christopher’s Nigerian accent is a beautiful contrast to the Irish sound that dominates the other characters. Both Sullivan and Voss have done brilliant work in coaching these actors to give them authentic sounds, really drawing the audience into the world of Playboy of the Western World.
If the production has faults, it’s predominantly pacing. Part of that is the way Bisi Adigun & Roddy Doyle have parsed out the first act (running just over an hour and a half) and the second act (running closer to 45 minutes.) While the production has been ‘new versioned’ to 2007 (100 years from its originating debut), present-day audiences tend to struggle with lengthy imbalances between the first act and the second, tolerating it if there’s a great deal of action being built into each scene. Adigun & Doyle’s work, based on J.M. Synge’s original, spends a lot of time building up exposition, which gums up the naturalized pacing of the show as a whole. Director Seth Ghitelman has moments, particularly during the earlier exchanges with Pegeen and Christopher, and the little spats between Michael and those in the pub, where the exchange of conversation needs to move more quickly. Argumentative bits need to bite on top of one another instead of the slightly more casual pacing with which Ghitelman has the actors approaching them. This adjustment in pacing could make for a nearly-perfect show (book-imbalances aside.)
That said, Ghitelman works alongside the aforementioned dialect coaches and other members of the production team to create an authentic feeling and sounding transportive experience. There is a liveliness in Ghitelman’s work, even when it comes to the tertiary (and seemingly unnecessary) characters of Honor, Sarah, and Susan (played by Olivia Cholewczynski, Morgan Fuller, and Amanda Brenner respectively, with a great deal of ‘teeny-bopper’ enthusiasm.) Ther is a momentary questionability to either Ghitelman’s direction or the playwright’s wording as at one point Pegeen threatens to throw the girls out for stealing drinks, stating she’ll need to see IDs making reference to them being 21 when the drinking age in 2007 is 18. That aside, these Muppet-characters are a bit like the Three Stoogettes, existing for awkward comic infusion rather than for the purposes of advancing the plot of the story— a skill which they achieve with their physical antics and overall energetic displays of star-struck affection toward Christopher.
Similar can be said of Jimmy (Bri Caelleigh) and Philly (William Darden Jr.) who are the brawny-muscle that flank Michael in various scenes. Caelleigh and Darden Jr. both do fine jobs in the roles that they’re given, though the characters exist as little more than living scenery from moment to moment. Filling out the space with their lunkhead attitudes and ‘hired-muscle’ airs, you get the sense that they could put a hurting on anyone they chose without cause or fear of retaliation.
Thomas Friend, playing the role of Sean, adds a lot of unintentional humor to the dark comedy that is this new adaptation of Playboy of the Western World. The character of Sean is such a dripping dip, he’s not even a wet-blanket, but a damp one. And Friend leans into that wimpy nitwit with rich gusto. Watching him scrabble about when trying to invent, find, and/or locate his character’s spine when standing up to both Pegeen and Michael is hilarious. And his accent is flawlessly on point to boot.
True knockdown, drag-out femme fatale whose just past her prime, the Widow Quin character is brought to vivacious life by Katherine Leiden. She’s a show-stopping, scene-stealing lech ready to sink her venomous talons into Christopher and the audience can’t help but love her. Decked out to the nines in some ‘mourning blacks’ which looks more like she’s going to the club to pick up rather than attending a funeral, Leiden’s Widow Quin takes every breath of air from the stage in every scene she’s in, even the surprisingly vulnerable one, where she confesses a truth to Christopher later on in the performance. Sassy, tarty, and filling out the trollop role with a confident ease, Leiden is an excellent addition to the cast for this production.
Bill Hurlbut’s accent has already been praised; his attitude as Michael, the mafia-father-figure is equally impressive. While the majority of his interactions with those on stage are passive and more ‘giving instructions and orders’ rather than heart-to-hearts, the dynamic that he manages to create opposite both Pegeen (Yael Schoenbaum) and Christopher (Justin Oratokhari) feels authentic and earnest.
The relationships— or mercurial attraction and distaste, at least on Pegeen’s part between her and Christopher makes for exquisite stage drama with a hint of humor mixed in for good measure. Both Schoenbaum and Oratokhari are bringing raw emotions to their respective portrayals of these characters. When Oratokhari first tells his story to Schoenbaum’s Pegeen, it’s like watching the most fascinating tennis match you’ll ever see because you’re torn between watching the way his story become reanimated through his voice and his body as he tells it and watching the way she’s hanging on his every word while trying to look ‘too cool for school’ and like she’s only half-interested.
Oratokhari has incredibly expressive facial expressions, particularly when trying to hide what his ‘heinous crime’ is at first. His body language is equally engaging and greatly consistent throughout the performance, making him a dynamic presence on stage. While the penultimate moments of the show are almost farcical in nature, with the returned-return of Malomo (Kevin Sockwell) and all the chaos that ensues inside the pub (shoutout to Lena Winter’s fight choreography worked into that scene) you find yourself enthralled with the emotional maelstrom brewing up between Oratokhari and Schoenbaum, even when they aren’t directly interacting with one another.
The play is a compelling one, if paced a bit awkwardly; the accents and scenic design are beyond what one expects from a community theatre production and the overall takeaway from this theatrical experience is certainly one that makes you think. How readily are we as human beings willing to turn someone into a hero…or a villain… because of their story? And simply because it is more exciting or more ‘famous’ than our own; a truly impressive topic to be considering at this point in our current climate. Catch this newly adapted production of The Playboy of the Western World at Silver Spring Stage running through February 9th 2025.
Running Time: 2 hours and 35 minutes with one intermission
Playboy of the Western World plays through February 9th 2025 Silver Spring Stage— 10145 Colesville Rd, Silver Spring, MD 20901. Tickets are available by calling the box office at 301-593-6036 or by purchasing them in advance online.
