INTERVIEW: John Keating explores issues of isolation in new play at Irish Rep

There are many actors who call the Irish Repertory Theatre in Midtown Manhattan their artistic home, but there may be no better candidate for that resume bullet point than John Keating. He has graced the Irish Rep stage 16 times and can be seen through the end of December in the new play The Pigeon in the Taj Mahal.

Keating plays the title character, Eddie the Pigeon, a lonely man living away from the trappings of society on a tucked-away campsite in western Ireland. His world is upturned when he meets a bride-to-be (Laoisa Sexton, who also wrote the play), and the two discover the many ways they are different and the many ways of finding solace with each other.

“The playwright, Laoisa Sexton, is a friend of mine,” Keating said recently in a phone interview. “We actually were all out as a group for my birthday, and she said, ‘You know, I have this idea for a play, and if I wrote it, would you have a read of it and see what you think of it.’ And she had written a role in it for herself, and unbelievably 12 weeks later to the day … she emailed me to say that she had written a play and would I like to take a look at it. Like so many things with actors, I had completely forgotten that she said she was going to do that because people say [that], and then it never happens. Or the play doesn’t take hold, or the idea doesn’t take hold. But she had it fully formed 12 weeks later.”

After reading The Pigeon in the Taj Mahal, Keating was blown away by the comedy. In fact, he wanted to perform the dialogue right away, but it took some time for Irish Rep to jump aboard and mount a full production.

Having the playwright of a piece also be the co-star is an interesting dynamic in theater. It allows the actors in the production to have immediate access to the creator, and collaboration becomes much more of an open discussion.

“I think it depends on the playwright, and I think that Laoisa, this playwright here, was very open to trying variations on lines, variations on moments, variations on parts of scenes in the rehearsal process,” Keating said. “Irish Rep gave us a long time to work on it really. We had about four weeks rehearsal, which is very nice. Often you only have three, so they were great with that. And the director also was Alan Cox. He was terrific at making himself available to come up with ideas for ways to play scenes. It wouldn’t have worked if the playwright wasn’t open to that, and she was, very much so. It worked out really well. It is an interesting dynamic, very much so.”

In the written play, there are few details on what makes Eddie the Pigeon a bit different than everyone else. This vagueness about the character and his mindset allowed Keating the freedom to interpret the role. The actor said he had the chance to find the character rather than play out stage directions from the printed page.

“I found that very freeing actually because I was able to put my own stamp on what I thought maybe his background [was] without embellishing it too much,” he said. “Each performance is revealing because her writing is complex and very fast. I think that, depending sometimes on differences in the pacing and differences in one of our energies, moments and relations between the two come out slightly differently each time, and they sort of grow each time we do it I find. We’ve been running for nearly five weeks now, and I found each week has been a growth in terms of the play.”

Keating said that he sees these two central characters as being lonely, but he seems to prefer the word “isolated” instead. Sexton’s character is isolated because she’s in an extremely difficult and possibly violent relationship. Eddie the Pigeon is isolated because the only person he had in his life was his mother, and she’s been deceased for a year when the play begins.

“[Sexton’s character has] been engaged to this man nine times,” he said. “So something’s not quite right there, and my character hasn’t spoken to probably anybody apart from the lady who runs the local store in the last year, and his employer who we get the idea drops by once in a blue moon with a paycheck in cash actually. So that’s the extent. That’s where their lives are at, so when they find each other initially she’s very reticent to talking to him at any level. And, of course, he’s absolutely fascinated with talking to her on every level, and over time, over an hour and a half, they really find something that they can help each other with in their lives, which is lovely to watch actually. Written as a comedy, but I think audiences find it very moving on that level, which is lovely for Laoisa that that’s happened, that audiences do find it very moving.”

Keating called the Irish Rep a “very special place.” He began his collaboration with the famed institution back in the mid-1990s when the company’s permanent home first opened its doors (the company was founded in 1988). In fact, co-founders Ciarán O’Reilly and Charlotte Moore saw Keating in a reading of a play and invited the actor to perform in the the new theater’s first production in 1995.

“I was sort of welcomed by the Irish-American community immediately after coming here,” Keating said of his early days in New York City. “It’s been a creative home for me ever since, but not just for me. It’s a creative home for many people, even people who come over from Ireland to do work here temporarily. They make you feel that that is your home when you’re there. … If you’re passing by the building, it’s somewhere where you’d walk in on any given day just to say hello to people because you do feel very much a part of a community there. They’ve been there since ’95, and hopefully they’ll be there in 2095 because it’s a very special place. And they give a lot of creative freedom to working on a play like Pigeon in the Taj Mahal.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

The Pigeon in the Taj Mahal runs at the Irish Repertory Theatre’s W. Scott McLucas Studio Theatre through Dec. 31. Click here for more information and tickets.