Sean Power - Reviews & Interviews

Rinty
5 Nov 1997 - Irish Echo:
"ARTS & LEISURE: Unanimous decision to 'flawless' Rinty" (by Joseph Hurley)

ARTS & LEISURE

Unanimous decision to 'flawless' Rinty

RINTY, by Martin Lynch. Macalla Theatre Company, Woodlawn Heights Church Hall. Through Nov. 9.

Sometimes on very rare occasions, an indescribable quality possessed by an actor, or by a role, or by both acting in coalition, enters into a kind of silent contract with an audience, resulting in a bond so strong that the viewers will follow the performer virtually anywhere.

Something of the sort is currently going on in a modest church basement in the Bronx, where a virtually unknown actor named Declan Mooney is giving a performance of sly grace and enormous charm in the title role of Belfast playwright Martin Lynch's "Rinty," documenting the life and times of John Joseph Monaghan, flyweight boxing champion of the world in 1949.

To be exact, the skillful Mooney plays more or less half of the life of Rinty Monaghan, who took his name from Rin Tin Tin, the German shepherd who became the American cinema's highest-earning canine star in the days before Lassie and Asta, the fox terrier owned by William Powell and Myrna Loy in the "Thin Man" series.

Lynch's "Rinty" is a memory play narrated by an older evocation of the scrappy little fighter, played in mature form by the excellent Mickey Kelly, giving us the 64-year-old hero, just two years or so before his death in March of 1984, a victim of cancer.

Under the remarkably adroit direction of the Macalla Theatre Company's artistic director, Donald Creedon, "Rinty" skips gracefully through the main events of Monaghan's professional and personal life, an existence in which the high-hearted hero appears to have been almost as dedicated to singing as he was to the prize ring.

In the second of Creedon's two fast-moving acts, Monaghan's love of singing provides the production with what amounts to a genuine show stopper, when the fighter, forced out of boxing by a severe sinus ailment, fronts a 1950s performing group of spectacular ineptitude. In truth, Rinty and the Rintonians managed to carve out a stage career of some 18 months' duration.

The Rintonians number stands as the show's crowd-pleasing high point, but it's far from the only memorable moment in a joyous production in which Creedon's 13-actor cast, obviously relishing what they're doing almost as much as the audience, breathes life into nearly countless quick sketches of the myriad individuals whose lives touched on that of Rinty Monaghan.

If Act Two's exuberant musical number, reminiscent in a way of the current hit movie, "'The FulI Monty," is the show's peak, the stylized boxing match in the first half, in which the nimble Mooney is matched point for point by the appealing and versatile Sean Power, in the role of Rinty's affable ring opponent, Bunty Doran, comes remarkably close.

In a.sense, the direction delivered in the Act One ring scene, a nifty little vaudeville routine all on its own, represents the imaginative Creedon, who is also a recognized actor and a fledgling playwright, at his best, as Mooney and Power trip through an energetically paced bout incorporating moving musician fragments as well as hilarious moments of introspection.

Like life itself, "Rinty," written in 1990 and produced in Belfast soon thereafter but apparently not elsewhere until the current Macalla staging, tends to darken as time passes. Toward the end of the second half, playwright Lynch scores a genuine coup as Kelly's wise, compassionate older Rinty approaches his brash, young alter ego as he and Mooney wait together as strangers in a bus shelter.

The mature Rinty tries to counsel his younger self, while the fighter's boyish evocation, thinking the older man deranged, mocks him and turns away, dismissing the privileged information he offers about the sad times to come, declining years that lie ahead for Mooney's Monaghan, and that, of course, Kelly's Rinty has already suffered. The scene is a rich and resonant one, all the more effective for representing a daring, mordant, and potentially risky break in the fabric of an otherwise buoyantly jovial endeavor.

Precisely how successful the passage is, standing as vivid counterpoint to most of what has gone before, and much of what will come, indicates the vibrant skill and confidence with which playwright Lynch,director Creedon, and, perhaps particularly, actors Mooney and Kelly, have approached the scene, and indeed the play as a whole.

Creedon's gifted cast, made up of Macalla veterans and a handful of newcomers, creates a little army of Monaghan friends, neighbors, colleagues and opponents, moving through the play's many, mainly brief, scenes at an amiably brisk clip, with the actors adding a hat or removing a pair of spectacles as they come and go on the two raked platforms that, along with a little collection of black cubes, serve as scenery for the spare, energetic production.

Standouts in Creedon's generally flawless cast, along with Mooney, Kelly and Power, include Jacqueline Kealy as the women in Rinty's life, dominant among them Frances, whom he married, Tony Nomey as a succession of doctors and journalists, the torpedo­shaped Tony Caffrey as the fighter's father, Rob Brennan as boxer Eddie McCullough, and, in a dazzling turn, Johnnie McConnell as a Monaghan crony named Choke-the-Dog, a friend not above borrowing a few coins from Rinty, money that is usually used to place a last-minute bet on the game little fighter's current ring opponent.

Plays far worse than "Rinty," and vastly less joyous and life-loving, have succeeded in theaters on Broadway and then gone on to prolonged life on regional and amateur stages. Unfortunately, the heady and richly enjoyable "Rinty" in the kind of production in which the actors stack the folding chairs after the lights come up in the auditorium, reaches the end of its brief, lovely road this coming Sunday afternoon in the simple, unpretentious environs of the Woodlawn Heights Church Hall, where director Creedon and his gifted, generous actors have got Martin Lynch's charming and moving play absolutely right, down to the last loving gasp.