Review: In The Smuggler, an Irish American Tells a Dramatic Barroom Story in Verse

The Irish Repertory Theatre's W. Scott McLucas Studio Theatre basement black box has hosted many a dour solo show over the years — which makes the scenic design for their latest solo play, Ronán Noone's The Smuggler, immediately striking. Even before you enter the theater and see the festive bar that lines the stage, scenic designer Ann Beyersdorfer (with the assist of properties designer Jason Brubaker) has decorated the walls in the front and back of the theater with all sorts of colorful portraits and paintings. Not only that, but director Conor Bagley has his star, Michael Mellamphy, clad in a short-sleeve button-down shirt and shorts (no costume designer is credited), serving drinks behind the bar and warmly bantering with audience members sitting in round tables on both sides of him.

It's a disarming prelude for what turns out to be a wildly dramatic, occasionally harrowing 85-minute monologue revolving around the adventures of Mellamphy's character, Tim Finnegan, an Irish immigrant who, in a fit of desperation after he loses his bartending job in Amity, Massachusetts, gets drawn into the often perilous underground world of refugee-smuggling. But while Noone's play tackles a dark and timely story, it does so with a playfulness that reflects its main character's surface charisma.

The Smuggler is subtitled "a thriller in rhyme," and verse is indeed how Finnegan chooses to tell his tale. Such a choice makes sense for the character, an aspiring writer and smooth talker who knows how to use words to get himself out of trouble. Don't expect the dazzling wordplay of a William Shakespeare, however. Among other things, clumsy repetition of words at the end of lines are fairly common, the cumulative effect suggesting more a second- or third-rate writer's attempt at verbal cleverness.

One could conceivably see this as less a deficit on Noone's part, however, than his deliberate reflection of the character's own inadequacies. Perhaps it's fitting that Finnegan eventually finds success in the shady world of people-smuggling rather than in the realm of literature. It helps that Bagley has directed Mellamphy to focus less on rhymes, repeated words, and meters than in conveying the spirit of his character: a man whose immediate charms mask a ruthlessness and sense of entitlement.

Finnegan is essentially chasing after his own version of the American dream. In his case, though, he's not just looking for a home and a settled life with his wife and infant son. Amity, as Finnegan describes it, is a moneyed town that still brims with racism toward migrants, exemplified by tensions that arose over a serious traffic collision years ago involving an undocumented Guatemalan immigrant. Such tensions instill in him, despite already being a naturalized American citizen, all sorts of insecurities, especially as someone who is less financially well off than most of its residents. Finnegan thus sees his exploits as a paid people smuggler — a "coyote," as he describes himself at one point — as much an opportunity to reclaim his self-respect as it is to profit monetarily.

In a sense, then, The Smuggler is the chronicle of a man who rediscovers his masculinity, which he equates with true-blue Americanness, for better or worse. Some may well find such a perspective limiting, especially as stories from the viewpoints of minorities and the historically oppressed have gained more traction in the theater world in recent years. The question of why one should care as much about this amoral man as about the people he's helping bring to the US for less-than-wholly altruistic reasons is something Noone never quite answers.

Nevertheless, for those who aren't bothered by such matters of identity politics, The Smuggler does raise enough troubling questions about what being an American truly means in this day and age for Finnegan's extended barroom anecdote to be worth seeing and contemplating. And if nothing else, Noone's play is an impressive showcase for Mellamphy, an Irish Rep veteran who clearly relishes the spotlight this show offers him. It's quite a feat to hold an audience's attention for a full 85 minutes, and Mellamphy manages it with impressive physicality, dexterity, and magnetism. (One violent confrontation with a rat is made especially memorable in Mellamphy's hands, supported by evocatively spooky lighting design by Michael O'Connor.) Rarely has a man's moral decline been made so purely entertaining to watch.