Always Alone is the last play in New American Plays 2, an early 80's collection of four plays, three of which I have written about here. The first two were the moody, poetic ensemble pieces Judevine and Daytrips, the third was Pill Hill. Pill Hill and Always Alone are both realistic dramas that center on the dreams and aspirations of a group of hopeful people and we watch them grow and change.

The play takes place in two acts comprised of six scenes each. It concerns Liam, an Irish immigrant who arrives in New York to work. The play takes place in the the mid to late 90's and there was a wave of Irish immigration then. Liam quickly finds that his lone contact in America, the nephew of a family friend, Seamus, has left New York. He is given solace by a friendly Italian bartender, Mario, who introduces him to a group of other Irish immigrants who become his defacto family in New York. They are three men and three women, who live across the hall from each other but who visit each other regularly, kind of like the sit com Friends.

The Men are: Owen, hard-nosed practical, hard working, slightly suspicious and mildly racist; Desmond, Owen's cousin, intellectual, sensitive, lazy and depressed; and Paddy, friendly, funny and just plain lucky. The women are: Mary good looking, forward thinking, and ambitious: Breda; conservative, prudish, overly religious: Paula who is unseen.

The play is a series of vignettes, showing Liam's first year in America. There's no real over arching event except for the conflict between Owen and Desmond. Owen has been looking out for Desmond who is reluctant to take the usual grunt work offered to immigrants. Desmond is depressed because he cannot find a place to be in this strange new America. Mary is a bit promiscuous and is really enjoying her freedom. She does not want to go back to Ireland. Paddy gets a job working for a wealthy New York family and ends up engaged and married to their daughter.

Despite being given a sinister aura by Owen, Mario turns out to be a great guy. The plays end with the accidental death of Desmond and the dispersion of the friends. The final moment is a monologue by Liam. He is now working at Mario's bar and the monologue is delivered to an unseen patron. The last moment has a new immigrant from Ireland arriving and asking Liam, as he did at the beginning of the play, “I'm looking for Seamus.”

The play has an odd quality to it. Some scenes I think are meant to be comic as are several motifs, like Liam's constant purchases of likely stolen goods from a black guy named Tyrone, but there is a wistfulness and sense of loss that haunts all the characters, which gives the play some melancholy.

I liked the play over all but it seems too rushed in it's current form. I would like to see this as a mini series with many of the events that are described or alluded to, shown. There is no real “plot.” It more of a character study and as such, it needs more time to work itself out well. Or fewer characters. The large cast makes focussing on any one character's situation too slapdash.

Ah, Pinter.

Pinter. Pinter. Pinter. I love me some Harold Pinter. He is a very distinctive voice in theatre. This is actually a collection of short plays. In 1982 it was presented as an evening of theatre with an encompassing title, Other Places. It was published as a complete play, so I am going to write about it as such.

The individual plays are Family Voices, Victoria Station, and A Kind of Alaska. The plays are thematically linked in that they all deal with faults in communication. I think they would definitely form a unified and exciting night of theatre, I will write about them in the order that they would be presented on stage although they are printed in reverse order.

The first play in the group is called Family Voices. It was originally written for radio but it could work well on stage. The play has three characters, a son, a mother and a father. They each read letters that they have written to each other. One wonders if anyone received any of these letters because they don't seem to be responses. The son writes the mother for advice dealing with his new living situation. The mother writes to the son trying to reconnect with him because he has vanished from her life. These are the letters that make up the bulk of the play. The father's letters come at the end. They are directed towards the son and are quite funny.

Victoria Station is also a comedy, which is somewhat rare for Pinter; this one is a full out farce for him. A taxi dispatcher tries to contact a taxi driver to send him on a call and ends up helping him through an existential crisis.

The most affecting piece in this group is A Kind of Alaska. It shows us a young woman, Deborah, who at the age of 14, fell victim to a sleeping sickness. She awakes in her mid-thirties and tries to adjust and understand what has happened to her. She is visited by a sympathetic doctor, Hornby, and her older sister, Pauline. All this happens in Pinter's terse, broken, language. One has to be a bit of a detective to make sense out of it all. This can be a bit frustrating as one wishes that people would just say things more clearly but that is the nature of Pinter's art.

I like these plays. The first two are strangely amusing and set up the third deceptively. One expects a more comic sensibility from it after the first two and that underscores both the humor and pathos of A Kind of Alaska. It is definitely the high point of this group and one of Pinter's strongest later plays.