The Smuggler

The Irish Repertory Theatre's production of The Smuggler was so impressive that I saw it twice, first with the group from the O'Neill Society that Sheila Garvey organized and again with my wife. Having little background in theater, I approach plays as texts that are being performed. The first time I see a production, I am focused on what the playwright is trying to say. I need to see the production a second time to consider the performative elements involved in how it is being said. Clearly, Ronán Noone's play is rich with stagecraft and important questions about identity, socioeconomics, and ethics—questions that resonate with plays by Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller, Lorraine Hansberry, and even sociological studies like Matthew Desmond's Poverty, By America.The Smuggler presents a performative challenge by requiring one actor to play eleven different characters and move the audience through several settings, from a bar to the bartender's shabby home, from a construction site to a darkened basement where the bartender is attacked by a rat, to his mother-in-law's backyard, where she has chained herself to a beloved sycamore tree. Michael Mellamphy was magnificent, magnificent, magnificent. I need to say it three times to come close to expressing how remarkable he was in performing this range of people as the bartender converses with others in these various places. The main character is Tim Finnegan, an Irish immigrant in modern-day America and an aspiring writer who loses his job when the tavern where he works on a vacation-community island off the Massachusetts coast goes bankrupt. Pushed by family pressure, he takes a job painting houses with a crew of South American immigrants. Ongoing financial difficulties and his struggle to preserve his sense of dignity lead to burglary, murder, and ultimately smuggling undocumented immigrants who will be exploited for their labor. From his comic antics juggling liquor bottles as he pours drinks to moments of somber reflection as he sinks into a moral morass where he slowly abandons his defining beliefs, Mellamphy masterfully expressed the full range of emotions that Noone asked of him.Upon seeing The Smuggler a second time, I understood that Mellamphy was not doing this alone. Set designer Ann Beyersdorfer replicated the feel of a bar for working-class locals in a wealthy, Cape Cod vacation community. At the back, out of the audience's view, was a door. During the play, knocks at that door led us to anticipate that Finnegan's deserved punishment had finally arrived. Each time, however, Mellamphy stepped to the door with trepidation, then stepped back into the audience's view with good news. It became clear that the world Noone has taken us into is like Marlow's Congo in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness where the cultural markers that enforce moral restraint have vanished. The audience's anticipation of punishment became merely a projection of our own fantasies, like those of Kurtz's beloved at the end of Conrad's novel. Likewise, Mellamphy's easy movement from character to character, place to place, and mood to mood was aided by Michael O'Connor's subtle changes in lighting and Liam Bellman-Sharpe's music, which nudged us through emotions from laughter to dread. Only in seeing the show a second time did I appreciate how important this background was to my understanding of Mellamphy's performance.In the talk-back, Noone mentioned how much he values plot twists. The plot twist that concludes The Smuggler was added only after Mellamphy and the director of an early staging of the play, David Sullivan, told Noone during rehearsal that his original ending was not working. Noone's solution of having one of the laborers, whom we assume is being exploited, emerge as the dominant figure who now controls the entire situation works brilliantly to lampoon the pretension and arrogance we often have toward immigrants. Although this is a one-character play, it was clear in the talk-back that once again Noone had worked intensely and yet smoothly with Mellamphy and director Conor Bagley to shape the details of this production.Noone has studied O'Neill's works well and cites O'Neill as a model. This is especially clear in his 2015 play, The Second Girl, and the 2022 expanded version, Thirst, two plays that revisit Long Day's Journey Into Night through the eyes of the Tyrones' household staff. In the talk-back, Noone mentioned both Long Day's Journey and The Hairy Ape as models for The Smuggler. All three plays explore the dark side of capitalism and immigrants as outsiders who come to the United States with hopes of embracing the American Dream through discipline and diligence but find themselves more exploited than welcomed. The Smuggler opens and closes with musical references to the 1958 song "Come Fly with Me," made popular by Frank Sinatra. In his opening lines, Finnegan announces, "I am an Amerikan," and the play closes with his repeating several times, "Everywhere opportunity knocks." But clearly, what the play depicts is that the American Dream is not just a bright social promise but also a pernicious demand. The cultural vision really is this: America has given you an opportunity, so you have to show that you took advantage of it by displaying your success. If you are not financially successful, you will face not only struggle and misery, but public contempt and the collapse of your self-respect, pushing you toward what Anne Case and Angus Deaton have called a "death of despair." Dignity in America is primarily about maintaining an appearance—which requires avoiding public shame—and that means its first ingredient is money.In the talk-back, reference was made to Arthur Miller's 1949 essay "Tragedy and the Common Man," which Miller wrote shortly after Death of a Salesman opened on Broadway. In it, Miller defines tragedy in terms of dignity by arguing that tragedy arises from "the underlying fear of being displaced, the disaster inherent in our being torn away from our chosen image of what and who we are in the world." This idea resonates with O'Neill's vision in The Iceman Cometh, where the denizens of Harry Hope's saloon fend off emotional pain arising from shameful events from their pasts by clinging to pipe dreams of redemptive tomorrows. The pipe dream is a way of avoiding shame, the destroyer of their fragile sense of dignity. Shame here is a sense of having failed to live up to an ideal of what they needed to be, an ethical failure of character in some way. I had thought this idea of shame leading to the collapse of dignity was a sufficient theory of tragedy. The Smuggler shows this vision is oversimplified. Finnegan preserves his sense of dignity not by struggling to maintain ethical ideals but by sinking ever more perversely into shameful, ethically abhorrent acts. He is not a resident of Harry Hope's saloon protecting himself from shame with pipe dreams of tomorrows; he is a Macbeth in modern-day America maintaining his dignity by embracing acts he recognizes as increasingly shameful.Just as Macbeth, having first rejected Lady Macbeth's entreaties, proceeds to murder Duncan and then must commit ever more hideous acts to preserve his hold on the kingship, Finnegan and then his wife become increasingly inured to the criminal acts that provide the money to support their comfort and public appearance. They move from their rented shack with inadequate plumbing to a fine home. Finnegan buys the bankrupt bar where he worked and reopens it. The source of the money for this is never questioned; its existence is all that counts.Seeing The Smuggler, I thought of A Raisin in the Sun and Walter Lee Younger's desperate lament about "the takers and the 'tooken'" and of some of today's politicians who, when accused of shady dealings, simply reply, "That makes me smart!" Tim Finnegan, an immigrant with a dream, becomes an "Amerikan" and tells us his story of that transition. What is Ronán Noone telling us here about ourselves? I like this sweater I bought at a discount. It was made in Bangladesh, probably by exploited laborers. I rarely think about that. The sweater looks and feels good. I enjoy it—not too differently from the way Macbeth hoped to enjoy his crown. Pursuing the American Dream of self-fulfillment has a dark side: it entices us to get comfortable being morally inattentive exploiters—perhaps what Noone means by "Amerikans." To deny that is a pipe dream—and Noone, like O'Neill before him, invites us to look with honesty at our own self-indulgent complicity in that exploitation.