A pair of Queens

Kate Moira Ryan and Kim D. Sherman craft a musical with promise

By Robert von Stein Redick

Leaving Queens plays through February 18 at Portland Stage Company. Call (207) 774-1043.

GENERATION NEXT: Alice Vienneau and Alexander Bonnin in Leaving Queens..

When playwright Kate Moira Ryan met composer Kim D. Sherman, the former made it plain: she had “nine months to a year” to collaborate on the musical about her family’s experience as immigrant Irish in New York. More than that she simply couldn’t spare.

That was 1995. But stories have a way of taking their makers for a ride, and this is especially true when the subject matter is an expansive one. Sherman and Ryan’s Leaving Queens, for example, encompasses four generations.

So it is not too surprising that the pair’s world premiere opened only last Friday at Portland Stage Company. Its strengths are many, as the warm reception it received from Friday’s audience testifies, and the assembled team of actors and musicians fairly bristles with talent. Yet it was heartening to learn that the process of editing goes on — an expanded scene here, a trimmed song there — for the current Queens is in need of it.

Among those aforementioned strengths, earnestness stands out. The tone is set from the moment we encounter Megan Grant (Alice Vienneau), pacing a dark stage between men and women frozen in attitudes of mourning. Filling the back wall is a hazy photograph of the rooftops of Kosovo. Megan, a photographer, has come to document the undeclared war. But her front of professional distance is no match for the stories (in song) with which the brutalized survivors bombard her. “Name, age, town?” she inquires, with fear of the answer. The Kosovars respond:

Name, age, town—

The shell went off and I fell down.

Name, age, town—

My family was buried in a mound.

Name, age, town—

Let me die, let me drown.

All is not gloom, however: some refugees find proof positive of their loved ones’ survival in Megan’s collection of pictures. But it’s fast becoming more than she can cope with. “I am tired, I am wired, let me sip my scotch, let me watch!” she laments. Before we know it, she’s back home in New York and Kosovo is gone — too absolutely gone for the resonance of this fine opener to carry through the evening.

The dominant story is all ahead. Megan’s slouched and bitter son (Alexander Bonnin) and desperate mother (Barbara Tirrell) are sitting awake in their nightclothes when the war correspondent staggers through her front door. But she is not the one they are waiting for: in her absence, Megan’s father has vanished into the city without a trace.

Here as in many spots, the music is full of agility and surprise. Like a modern opera, the lyrics at their best do two jobs at once, advancing the story while sharpening our view of the emotional landscape.

How many times did I ask him,

‘Is it me, Joe? Is it the job, Joe?

Is it someone else? Is it the kid?

Just let me know!’

Tirrell’s question is never conclusively answered, but in the pursuit of it, as much as the pursuit of her father, Megan at last takes notice of her family’s bittersweet history.

Inevitably, this involves flashbacks — the boat’s arrival at Ellis, her grandfather’s security-guard job at the Museum of Modern Art. But Ryan’s flashbacks are braided smoothly into the present, sparing us the jolt of time travel more effectively than, say, the revolving music box of last week’s Communicating Doors (“Sci-fi comedy,” February 2). Megan retreats to her darkroom, develops ancient negatives, while behind her Thomas Grant (her grandfather, played by Jim Jacobsen) leads his family down the gangway onto Ellis Island.

Trouble begins with landfall, for the play even more than the family. For just when we think to enter the dramatic heart of the story, Queens opts for vagueness. Even a musical needs a certain level of detail in order to evoke a life, let alone six lives across four generations. We actually learn nothing about “the Irish immigrant experience.” There’s not a hint of the racism these new Americans faced, not a whisper of the social and economic forces that sundered the community.

Instead, we have glimpses of a family: the death of Megan’s grandmother, the alcoholism of her grandfather, young Joe pick-pocketed at the wharf. But these moments are sketched with a broad, dreamy brush, and their impact is correspondingly hazy.

The music tends to blur the image further. Call me jaded, but I see no purpose in another tribute to Ellis Island and the Brave Family at the Gunwales, saluting Lady Liberty, except inasmuch as that family is conceded its quirky specifics. And there’s no specificity to an Irish father who drinks away his woes at a featureless pub, nor a dying mother who’s only message for her son is, “Don’t be thinkin’ negative!” More conjecture, more meat on the bones, could bring the story vibrantly to life.

Of course, mystery is partly the point, and sometimes it is harnessed in powerful fashion. In a most effective scene, Megan and the grandmother who died decades before her birth meet in the twilit graveyard in Queens. “I thought you’d never come!” sings the the old ghost, courting the worldly-wise daughter. The two dance a sultry, slow-motion jig, while around them the family dead, backs turned, unrecognized, sing an eerie “Stay-Oh.”

Yet mysteries, like any kind of drama, raise an expectation of discovery. Here, both the overt questions (where and why did Megan’s father run off?) and the existential ones (Who is she? What does she really need to learn?) are answered with generalities. Conflict, meanwhile, is resolved without much evidence of struggle. Anne’s critique of Megan for casually ignoring her son could have packed an emotional whollop. But the energy is drastically muted by playing out the whole scene upon a porch swing, where Megan sits like a statue, and Anne merely teeters and tut-tut’s. Again, greater impact seems just a detail away.

Just how great that impact might be is an open question. With its strong actors, delightful piano-cello-violin trio, and many moments of grace, Ryan and Sherman’s play could set sail from Portland to a very bright future indeed. Before it does, I hope a few Mainers get the chance to see a different, more textured, side of Queens.

Robert von Stein Redick can be reached at robvsredick@earthlink.net.