We might expect Hugh Leonard’s classic 1978 play, Da, a semi-autobiographical account of the playwright wrestling to free himself of the oppressive memories of his recently deceased father, to teem with sentimentality. But Da thwarts that expectation with heavy doses of bitterness and angst. Every time the play seems ready to make a turn towards sappy, warm-hearted memories, it halts abruptly in favor of a more quotidian struggle with the desire to be loving and emotional in the face of overwhelming spite. Mawkishness lays always on the outskirts of this play, but is never called upon to makes its entrance.
The play opens as a middle-aged Charlie (Ciaran O’Reilly) is in the final stages of cleaning up his boyhood home in Dublin after his father’s funeral. His attitude is one of due-diligence: perform the ceremony, mourn with the community, pack up the house, and neatly move on. Unfortunately, his psyche has other plans. It only takes a few moments of being alone in his boyhood home before the ghost of his father (Paul O’Brien)—the Da of the play’s title—saunters into the living room to get himself a cup of tea and sit in his favorite chair.
The play allegorizes Charlie’s struggle to reconcile his own independent identity with the lingering influence of a father and home life he continues to find overbearing. Da is quick with a joke and a song, and seems to want little more out of life than his meager gardening job and a pipe in his favorite chair, but in his lackadaisical journey through life, Charlie sees obstruction to his own ambitions.
The set in the Irish Rep’s small temporary Union Square space (it’s home in Chelsea is under ambitious renovations), captures the oppressive claustrophobia of Charlie’s wrought psyche with an attractively dank living space whose walls are permeable to the specters of Charlie’s memory. The cast delivers fine performances throughout, especially O’Reilly, who elicits vividly the emotional conflicts seething inside Charlie.
Still, O’Brien’s sprightly portrayal often makes it difficult to sympathize with Charlie’s angst. Fathers regularly aggravate their sons’ nerves, and so the play leaves us wondering what is so unique and compelling about this father-son relationship. There is at least an element of universality—the sense of all adults struggling to find their own path independent of their parents—but Leonard’s Charlie never shows the self-awareness to signal that universality. His is a solipsistic existence, making it difficult for the rest of us to relate to the play.