Eva O’Connor plays Maz and Ciaran O’Brien is Bricks in Maz and Bricks, a play written by O’Connor.
Maz and Bricks, a production of the estimable Irish company Fishamble, draws on many of the hallmarks of Irish drama in the last quarter century. Playwright Eva O’Connor tells her story, a two-hander, with vibrant narrative monologues alternating with scenes and even a double direct address from its characters to the audience. The monologue intertwining has been a staple of Irish playwriting from Brian Friel (Faith Healer, 1979) to Conor McPherson (Port Authority, 2001). The scabrous language, elevated to poetry, is equally Irish.
With a minimalist set (by Maree Kearns), the story begins on a train. A young woman (O’Connor herself, as Maz), is sketching a man—or so it seems. The man is Bricks (Ciaran O'Brien), and he’s chatting away on his cellphone, relating his sexual conquests of the night before, and taking intermittent notice of the young woman who is sketching him. It’s a superb bit of misdirection by the author, as we soon learn they are unacquainted and the sketch is not what it seems.
The two characters warm up to each other.
From that point a dark story of Ireland’s struggles to make abortion legal unfolds, as well as pretty grim situations of the two characters. Death and violence have stalked their lives. Maz is on her way to an anti-abortion rally in Dublin. Bricks is heading to pick up his daughter from his ex-wife, a “psycho ex-bird.”
The drama depends on two people who might ordinarily never have met each other, and their personalities are like oil and water. But, as in shows from Twentieth Century to Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, the skirmishes and cease-fires constitute the drama.
Bricks isn’t such a full-of-himself jerk as he initially appears. He comes across at first as what most women would regard as an unreconstructed male: he drinks with his buddies at the pub, he hits on the opposite sex, and he’s confident in his looks and carnal abilities. O’Brien plays him with a twinkle in his eye, so that his bad behavior is more an unthreatening vestige of adolescence.
Still, it puts him on the wrong side of feminism. But Bricks proves to be more sympathetic in unexpected ways. There’s his love for his daughter, and his natural instinct to protect her. Initially, that makes him an abortion opponent, but as he elicits—and deduces—Maz’s history, he gains stature. He’s not an idiotic gob. Part of O’Connor’s point is that people are not what they seem on the surface.
Maz, too, for all her energetic rabble-rousing, has a history of abuse and pain, and O’Connor makes her character compelling and fascinating, as well as sympathetic, of course.
Bricks’ wife, having heard about him sleeping with a relative of hers on the previous night’s bender, denies him his right to spend the day with his daughter. Free for the day, he attends the march, spots Maz, and the two characters spend the day together. They wander around Dublin, echoing James Joyce’s Ulysses, and get to know each other. They feel their way around each other’s personalities—an encounter with a friend of Bricks to whom he fails to introduce Maz sets her off on a tantrum. She has low self-esteem. Gradually, though, the sense arises that the two might be compatible deep down. As a character study, Maz and Bricks is fascinating.
There are drawbacks. Sometimes the language is impenetrable. What is an American to make of Bricks’ top three wishes?
One, I’d like to be able to walk through glass doors…. I’d also like to be able to time travel, I’d go back to Saipan and convince Roy Keane to take his head out of his arse, eat his prawn sandwiches and do his bit for his country. The prick. … Three, I’d like to have the power to communicate with wasps.
The opening scene finds Maz apparently sketching Bricks. Photographs by Lunaria.
His explanation for the last is amusing, but the topical Irish references can leave a listener at sea. (Still, the production is part of Origin’s 1st Irish Festival, so anyone attending should be prepared for a whole lot of Oirish.)
The last scenes are moving and sad, dispelling the romantic comedy fizz for a much darker and more ambiguous ending. Although much in the play is familiar from other Irish drama, and one’s pleasure may depend on tolerance for swaths of the story being told rather than dramatized, O’Connor’s drama is worth a visit.
Maz and Bricks plays through Feb. 2 as part of Origin’s 1st Irish Festival at 59E59 Theaters (59 E. 59th St.). Evening performances are at 7:15 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday; matinees are at 2:15 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. For tickets and information, visit 59e59.org.
