http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/27/theater/27broken.html?8dpcComing Out in Ireland: Stories Set to Song 
Sean Millar in rehearsal for the show, which begins a run at the Public Theater on Jan. 8. The production is part of
the Under the Radar Festival. The show previously ran at the Dublin Theater Festival.
By GWEN OREL
Published: December 25, 2009
A MIDDLE-AGED man says he always knew there was something different about him, even as a child. Another man describes falling in love with a friend — and realizing for the first time that he was gay. A man sings a torch song to his lover who died of AIDS, while the members of the male chorus behind him slowly pair off and dance to the dark melodies performed on two cellos, a keyboard and light percussion.
Such tales may be old hat for audiences in New York, but they are still new in Ireland. These scenes, based on the true stories of older Irish men willing to flout tradition by frankly discussing their homosexuality, form the spine of “Silver Stars,” produced by Dublin company Brokentalkers, which runs at the Public Theater Jan. 8 to 16 as part of the Under the Radar Festival.
Created by three straight men — the composer and writer
Sean Millar, and the Brokentalkers directors
Feidlim Cannon and
Gary Keegan — the show incorporates audio from interviews conducted by Mr. Millar as well as music, video and performances by a largely amateur cast of gay men who sing, dance and occasionally lip-sync to the interviews.
Mr. Millar said his inspiration for the work was an older gay friend who shared his life story as the two struggled to stay awake during a road trip across Ireland. “I began thinking about older guys who’d made tough decisions in really repressive Ireland, stuck to it, were punished for it,” he said during a video telephone interview from Dublin.
The resulting project is a spare musical staging of vignettes punctuated by multimedia elements. In one, “There Is No Greater Joy,” for example, an actor holding a microphone wears glasses with pictures of eyes on them and stands in front of a live video feed of himself lip-synching to recorded audio of
John McNeill, a gay Irish-American Jesuit priest who fought in World War II.
“Miles Davis called everything that he did a song,” Mr. Millar said. “ ‘There Is No Greater Joy’ is seven minutes of a phone interview, and I still call it a song.”
Not exactly documentary, not exactly fiction, the musical is typical for Mr. Millar, 45, whose work has been the subject of both a master’s and a doctoral dissertation. But the approach stems as much from Mr. Millar’s vision as from Brokentalkers, a company founded by Mr. Cannon and Mr. Keegan to create innovative live performance.
The three first crossed paths last year, when Mr. Millar won a commission to create a work for the Bealtaine Festival in Dublin, and the festival’s artistic director,
Dominic Campbell, paired the songwriter with the Brokentalkers. The company, established in 2001 to highlight aspects of Irish theater other than its spoken language, had already built a reputation with works like “Track,” which took the audience through Dublin by having them listen on headphones to the tour guide of the Chinese people who live there. “Silver Stars,” though less technologically flashy than earlier productions, explores contemporary multicultural Ireland by recounting what has remained an untold story, Mr. Cannon explained.
Their experimental approach began long before the staging. Since finding older gay male performers in Ireland was challenging, Brokentalkers resorted to what might be called street casting.
“We put up posters and flyers in gay bars and went to community halls,” Mr. Cannon said. “We were three heterosexual men asking them to trust us and let us take their stories.”
One cast member’s story ended up being woven into the script. “It stops becoming just a gay story,” said the actor,
Michael Byrne. “People identify their own relationships with their parents or lost loves. Everybody gets caught by the song where a mother tells her son that God tells her his life is a sin, but ‘I Love You More Than God.’ ”
Other vignettes center on Irish-Americans including
Robert Rygor of the protest group
Act Up, and
Brendan Fay, who started the St. Pat’s for All Parade in Queens as a counterpoint to celebrations that bar gays from marching.
The show has been a success, selling out its four-show run at the Project Arts Center as part of the Bealtaine Festival in 2008 and earning a run at the Dublin Theater Festival this September, where it drew the attention of Meiyin Wang, an associate artist at the Under the Radar. “It really touches your heart,” said
Mark Russell, the artistic director of Under the Radar, adding that the stories are “so culturally specific that they become very universal.”
The combination of heartfelt Irish history with modern style in “Silver Stars” impressed
Eugene Downes, chief executive of Culture Ireland, which produces the Dublin Theater Festival with the Irish Theater Institute. It is “far from
Synge, O’Casey, Oscar Wilde,” Mr. Downes said by phone from Dublin. The show “opens up the themes in a theatrical way,” he added. “This is not ancient history for us.”
Mr. Millar said that it’s particularly satisfying to bring the show to New York, where so many Irish men fled.
One of his subjects sees value in presenting it anywhere. “Millar is like a 21st century bardic poet,” Mr. Fay said by telephone. “Irish people need cultural storytellers to break the silences.”
