Wednesday cast among the A-listers at Abbey in Dublin to see Aidan Quinn and Steve Buscemi
Actors Aidan Quinn and Steve Buscemi with director Caitríona McLaughlin at the Abbey Theatre on Sunday night for the reading of Ages of the Moon. Picture: Mark Stedman
A pair of paparazzi are the only giveaway outside the Abbey Theatre for what proves to be a lowkey night of high-wattage celebrity at the national theatre on Sunday eve. The sold-out crowd was there to see Aidan Quinn and Steve Buscemi perform a reading of Sam Shepard’s 2009 play Ages of the Moon, originally performed at the same venue by Stephen Rea and Sean McGinley.
But sure enough, as curtain time nears, Tim Burton took his seat in front me. Like Buscemi, he’s in Ireland for the filming of the new series of Wednesday for Netflix. The star of the show, and of Burton’s recent Beetlejuice sequel, Jenna Ortega, soon arrived, along with others from the series, including Joy Sunday.
Onstage, meanwhile, the two stars got down to it, playing Ames and Byron, two old friends reunited by their late-life loneliness. We are left to imagine the clacking screen door, the faulty fan overhead that almost becomes a character itself in the fully staged version. In a happier coincidence, the tiered set from the play Grania, still running at the Abbey, doubled nicely as the porch this crotchety pair sit on.
The parts could have been written for them. The ruddy-faced Quinn is the garrulous, physical Ames. The instigator, the more obvious outdoors man. As Byron, Buscemi is anything but Byronic: paler, and slight, he seems the more urban figure, and brings his trademark sardonic, querulous note to the character.
Speaking afterwards, Buscemi told me he felt a little nervous given the lack of preparation. He needn’t have worried. His expert timing throughout belies that, as he and Quinn inhabit the roles, mining them for comedy and the occasional explosive moment. With the inevitability of the true artist, Buscemi focused on a moment he was less pleased with. “There was this beat that I missed,” he said. “And there’s this long pause and I’m sitting there going, ‘Why are we stopped’ then I realise, ah, I’ve missed a one-word line there!”
Nonetheless, Buscemi described his Abbey outing as a great experience, his first time working with his old friend. For Quinn, meanwhile, the choice of play goes back to 2010, when he saw it in New York. “My wife punched me on the shoulder,” he explained, “and said, ‘you have got to do this play!'”
It was the Abbey’s artistic director Caitriona McLaughlin who had the idea of pairing actors with scripts they love for unrehearsed readings. Fiona Shaw was first up, leading a strong local cast for Stefano Massini’s 7 Minutes. “One of the great honours you get in rehearsals is just to see the rawness of an actor’s response to the text,” McLaughlin said afterwards. “And I just thought this would be a really lovely thing to do: a way to start projects, maybe inspire people and give something different to the audience at the same time. They genuinely only had a couple of hours with the script but they have a 37-year friendship, so they brought that trust they have for each other.”
Certainly the consensus around the room was that we’d witnessed, in Buscemi, one of the great performers doing his thing. For Abbey executive director Mark O’Brien, the feeling was of having that index of onscreen Buscemi moments echoed in front of you. Sean McGinley, meanwhile, who played the same role in 2009, described it as like seeing a new play.
In a way, of course, it was new. Quinn and Buscemi remained seated throughout, with a narrator speaking the action, of which there’s quite a bit: the shootin’ and fightin’ you might expect from a Shepard work. “It’s common that someone gets injured in his plays,” McGinley told me.
It’s not hard to see why: he described having to fall backwards off the porch nightly, and then, in a later scene, faceplant into it with his hands by his sides. He escaped unscathed, he said.
The same was not true for Cork actor Catherine Walsh, another Shepard veteran in attendance. She described being hurt during Fool for Love, directed by Annie Ryan in 2008, around the time Shepard wrote Ages of the Moon. She quoted his response, to much amusement: “The dame always gets hurt in this play.” No dames, or fellows, were hurt in the making of this memorable night.
“It was a beautiful thing,” Caitriona McLaughlin said. “These are two of the great actors of our time. It’s a real honour, and hopefully they’ll both come back and do the full thing.”
