Portrait of playwright read aloud

By Joseph T. Rozmiarek
Advertiser Drama Critic

•	'Drums Under the Windows' 2 p.m. Sunday and March 16 Richardson Theatre, Fort Shafter $6 438-4480, 438-5230

So it's a tough task that Vanita Rae Smith has assigned herself in mounting a Readers' Theater production of "Drums Under the Windows" by Irishman Sean O'Casey. Best known as a playwright during the mid-20th century, O'Casey also produced six volumes of autobiography, making him appear a bit full of himself — even for an Irish playwright.

This work is the third in the series, dealing with the years 1906 to 1916, and was adapted for the stage, as were the first two volumes, by O'Casey student Paul Shyre.

The work balances narration and stage action to blend O'Casey's history with his vivid imagination.

Since most Irish playwriting of this period mixed heroic voices, religion, politics, and blarney, one suspects that the boundary between fact and imagination in this piece may be somewhat blurred. Smith further reduces it to 75 minutes of melody for voices, making it one of the shortest works with one of the largest casts in her Readers' Theater series.

It succeeds best when the music of the prose matches the mental images summoned by the words, capturing even those who are not students of O'Casey or Irish history. It has several strong scenes.

We get a sense of the impoverished young man who educated himself and worked at manual labor for years to support his mother, even while writing his first play.

Michael Hanuna effectively suggests the shovel fatigue that leaves him too tired to eat and the stubbornness necessary to make his muscles conform to his will. Richard Pellett's narration evokes effective stage pictures, and Sylvia Hormann-Alper, Jo Pruden, and Dean Turner provide a tumble of random voices that fill in the scenes.

But it's the personal vignettes, rather than the political diatribes, that are the most successful.

There's the mental inmate who went from "ashes to ashes before he was dead."

The corpse of O'Casey's dead sister, discovered only when the children she slept with noticed her body growing colder, necessitated the "poorest funeral the neighborhood ever saw."

And an old man, too weak to walk into a tumultuous rally, but still able to tally his progeny through three generations and 365 souls.

There's spirited argument over fellow Irish writers Synge and Yeats, and whether one of them should be damned for using the word "shift," and a vivid proclamation that "the voice of the people is the voice of God when it shouts against oppression."

But for all its lilt and rich imagery, this reading of "Drums Under the Windows" remains a difficult and often disjointed piece for the casual theatergoer, with only the autobiographical voice of O'Casey to surface among the waves of rhetoric to give it a sense of continuity.