Thirst

In Thirst, playwright Ronán Noone imagines the story on the other side of the kitchen wall from the living room of the volatile and tragic Tyrones depicted in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1939–41). Noone’s creation incorporates comedy, which makes only fleeting appearances in Long Day’s Journey, and shows his characters well on the road toward likely achieving their goals at the play’s closing. Thirst embodies an idea Noone once expressed in the New Hibernia Review: “if you find despair in the living room you should find hope in the kitchen” (130). To that end, the play portrays a pivotal day in the lives of the Tyrones’ servants: Bridget, the Irish immigrant cook; her niece, Cathleen, the household’s second girl; and the down-on-his-luck American, Jack, the family chauffeur. We watch them execute quotidian tasks and, more importantly, observe their personal hurts and hopes below the surface of such duties.Bridget came to America sixteen years prior to the August day in 1912 when Long Day’s Journey takes place, having left behind her illegitimate son, a bargain to which she agreed to spare her family shame. She dutifully sent funds to Ireland, which enabled her niece, Cathleen, to follow her and obtain employment. Bridget’s trauma follows her, too; she remains embittered and drinks to excess. She resents the plucky Cathleen and, at the same time, feels responsible for her niece’s well-being. Jack, a recovering alcoholic, has witnessed Bridget’s compassion (in fact, he comments on the softer side beneath her crusty veneer) and credits her for rescuing him. He has fallen in love and wants Bridget to marry him and move West. Meanwhile, Cathleen aspires to an acting career.Noone’s piece is no simple upstairs-downstairs tale. Rather, it stands both apart from and beside O’Neill’s classic. As Noone observes, the two pieces are in conversation with one another. An apt analogy might be the image of DNA’s double helix, with its hydrogen bonds standing in for touch points between the two plays. Themes of deracination, generational trauma, and the timely topic of (US) immigration are baked into Thirst. Although written as a response to Long Day’s Journey, Thirst provides audiences completely unaware, disinterested in, or even outright opposed to O’Neill’s work with an engaging story, social commentary, fine drama, and comedy.In a subtle reference to the acclaimed American playwright—a fun sidebar for O’Neill afficionados—Thirst borrows its title from O’Neill’s one-act from 1913 in which three characters in a life raft, having survived a shipwreck, are desperate for sustenance amid the enormity of the sea. They desperately seek drinking water and embody themes of survival and the human instinct to forge on. Noone’s three characters, too, must each determine whether to remain stuck or to move forward, embracing America—and, if so, how.O’Neill scholars may savor Thirst’s abundant allusions to Long Day’s Journey: references include Mary’s morphine addiction and life lies, James’s drinking, Edmund’s cough, and more. As the play nears its conclusion, Mary Tyrone’s piano playing is audible, and then, late in the play, Jack peaks into the living room and sees Mary coming down the stairs, wearing the iconic wedding dress from Long Day’s Journey Into Night.The two plays share additional similarities: both make use of copious stage directions, an O’Neill hallmark. As Steve Bloom noted in a Zoom panel, there is an “O’Neillian tendency” to Noone’s emotional stage directions, when he describes his characters’ motivations and inner lives. The plays’ events, as noted, transpire in the same house—one in the living room, the other in the kitchen.Noone repeatedly acknowledges his debt to O’Neill and reveals his writing process, replete with challenges. Thirst’s current iteration, from conception to birth, is the outgrowth of a decade-plus gestation period. Nowhere is the playwright more explicit about O’Neill’s influence on his work than in his New Hibernia Review article in which he confesses that he “fell in love” with his source material. Until another playwright reminded him that a writer’s source should never become precious, he strained to strike a suitable balance between paying homage to O’Neill and imbuing Thirst with an appropriate tone all its own. This advice from his colleague prompted Noone to reconfigure the opening scene that launches his stage action.Although Thirst opens on the eve of the day that begins the Tyrone family’s long day’s journey, Noone has assiduously aligned the play’s action with that of its progenitor. In the script, he lists the precise time of day for each scene to the exact hour and minute, carefully crafting his action to coincide with significant moments in Long Day’s Journey. Like O’Neill, Noone adopts the neoclassical twenty-four-hour rule for the play’s action. The two fictional stage times merge when Mary Tyrone plays the piano off-stage, Bridget and Jack dance to the accompaniment, and then finally kiss.Because of my fascination with scenic design for O’Neill’s plays, I entered the Lyric Stage production anxious to see how the kitchen of Monte Cristo, the O’Neills’ summer cottage in New London, Connecticut, named in honor of the role that sustained James O’Neill’s acting career, would be interpreted on stage. Monte Cristo served as the setting for Ah, Wilderness! (1933), O’Neill’s only comedy, a romantic romp through a few days of the playwright’s youth as he reimagined it, and for Long Day’s Journey. O’Neill sketched ground plans as he plotted potential blocking for the latter, and these drawings mirror the footprint of the cottage’s living room. That room remains intact, with its wicker furniture, table, and chandelier (famously askew with dangling cord in productions). Monte Cristo is owned and operated by the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center and is open for tours by appointment. The kitchen (the setting for Thirst) is not pictured in promotional material or available to tour. The O’Neill kitchen being inaccessible as reference, Noone turned to his Irish grandmother’s home as a model.The center section of the Lyric’s audience faced the kitchen, with a stage-left swinging door leading to the Tyrones’ spaces, an upstage-left servants’ staircase, and a stage-right door to the exterior. The kitchen was indicative of the period and detailed, carefully appointed and constructed to accommodate required stage business, specifically cooking. Alluding to Long Day’s Journey (and to James Tyrone’s penny-pinching, also voiced in dialogue), one globe was missing from the chandelier, and the fixture itself hung askew. Local reviewers noted scenic designer Janie E. Howland’s naturalistic working spigot, the burning of the chicken, and the smell of bacon cooking, but I have not seen mention of the opening to August Strindberg’s Miss Julie (1888), or the Swedish playwright’s influence on O’Neill, and, in turn, on Noone. David Remedios’s soundscape, including the gulls and the Long Day’s Journey–influenced foghorn, as well as nonintrusive musical underscoring, contributed to the production’s mood. Lighting was coordinated to enhance the onstage action and to emphasize the Tyrones’ offstage activities as well. Costumes were appropriate for the era and reflected the characters’ given circumstances.An intimate three-hander, Thirst is perfectly suited to the Lyric’s small, thrust stage. Since her character evolves across the play, Bridget may be viewed as the protagonist, but Thirst is an exemplary ensemble piece in which each character is featured and alternatively supports the others. Both in the script as written and through Courtney O’Connor’s staging at the Lyric, each is offered specific moments in which to shine: Jack with his “soliloquies” as Cathleen calls them; Bridget with her moving impromptu confession about her son and the moments during which she is left alone on stage, and Cathleen’s rehearsals of Shakespearian monologues. From her delightful drunken entrance as Bridget, Aimee Doherty captured the good nature and even humor that her character’s outwardly stern manner belies. Before Bridget enters, we hear Cathleen performing lines from The Tempest offstage, and then her script catapults through the door. The redheaded Kate Fitzgerald, who played this role, then stormed into the kitchen, picked up the book in defiance, exited, and then quickly popped her head back in. From that moment on, I eagerly anticipated her return, for it is she who, as Noone’s fool, with exquisite timing and facial expression, broke the tension of scenes and provided comic relief. Jack’s understated demeanor was thoughtfully portrayed by Michael Kaye, whose character functions, if not as foil, as interlocutor to the others. The actor subtly conveyed that still waters run deep, with just the right touches of irony and humor.Two-person scenes reveal the complexity of the characters’ relationships. Bridget and Cathleen perform a comic Irish song and dance that draws them closer to one another. Jack and Cathleen play an amusing game of “Guess who I am?” in which they each imitate Bridget and the offstage Tyrones. Jack and Bridget share the stage in poignant moments that point to their potential union, but often end abruptly, leaving us hoping for resolution. The actors’ ability to convey emotion, comic timing, and character relationship through their use of props was extraordinary. Without wallowing in it as the playwright warns, the Lyric actors skillfully executed the lyricism that is the hallmark of Noone’s piece.