Flanagan Sees Relevance, Polemics in Friel’s ‘City’

Actress Fionnula Flanagan is, in her own words, split.

“It’s one of the dilemmas of being a self-elected exile,” the red-haired actress said. “It’s not the same thing as being Irish-American. I’m not an American citizen. I’m Irish--living here. I don’t feel that anywhere is home. I experience roots when I go back to Ireland: That’s where I come from, it’s my instant identification. But I’ve lived other places, been away so long. . . . In fact, the idea was never to stay here--that’s just the way it happened. We go where the work takes us. Where life takes us.”

Work and life have taken Flanagan to Theatre West, where she’s directing a production of Brian Friel’s “Freedom of the City” (1972), opening today.

“It examines the whole civil rights movement in the north of Ireland,” she said. “It’s what happens to the poor people, the have-nots, the disenfranchised when they begin to organize and make protest, look for changes in their lives, such as a vote, such as better housing, schools, jobs, having a voice in the community. The story is based on a (1972) incident called Bloody Sunday: a civil rights demonstration in which 13 unarmed civilians were shot dead by the British army. It swelled the ranks of the IRA overnight. They couldn’t have had a better recruitment.”

The actress, a member of L.A. Classic Theatre Works, makes no effort to hide her feelings. Nor, she claims, does author Friel (who lives in Donegal--outside Derry, where “Freedom” is set).

“The play itself is polemical,” Flanagan said. “I think it’s quite relevant to what’s happening in the north of Ireland and South Africa.

“The whole thing has been presented over the past 10 years as a problem between Protestants and Catholics, and the economic situation is absolutely ignored. Well, I don’t believe that people go out and kill one another over religion. The Christian Crusades were a great excuse for land-grabbing.

“But the newspapers have portrayed the (Irish) situation as if people (woke up) in the morning and made up their minds to harass either the Catholics or Protestants. Believe me, there’s much more concern with putting bread on the table and paying the rent. And the unemployment rate is staggering.”

Flanagan, a 1975 Emmy-winner for her seductive Clothilde in “Rich Man, Poor Man,” feels keenly the need for more consistent news coverage of world problems, and what she perceives as the American public’s resistance to it.

“We in this country seem to have a terrible devotion to being entertained, that something new has to be presented every day. It’s almost as though our focus cannot sustain taking on a relentless onslaught of misery.”

This play won’t be such an onslaught.

“It’s not a lecture about the situation in the north,” said the actress/director, who’s added a half-hour pre-curtain prologue to the 35-actor piece. “It’s extremely entertaining. No, it’s not ‘Me and My Girl.’ Thank goodness. It’s not meant to be.

“But Friel (whose “Translations,” on the disruptive and dispiriting introduction of the English language in 1830s Ireland, played at the L.A. Stage Company in 1984) has that great gift of being able to write something very funny, then bring home the tragedy in the next moment, then sweep right back into a comic moment.”

The personal connection?

“It speaks of things that are dear to my heart,” she said simply. “Of course, I don’t live in Ireland. I can say that with some relief. It would be extremely difficult for me to live there. I think that within 24 hours I’d probably be carrying a gun for somebody. Any time I go there, I’m incensed and outraged.

“Doing this play, I hope, will bring people’s attention to some of the realities of that experience: what it’s like to live under military occupation.”

Flanagan left Ireland in 1968. Trained at the Abbey Theatre, she’d appeared with Bristol’s Old Vic Company in “Playboy of the Western World” and “The Taming of the Shrew.” Ironically, her first American appearance was in Burgess Meredith’s Broadway staging of Friel’s “Lovers,” followed by the role of Molly Bloom in “Ulysses in Nighttown.”

That experience led Flanagan to develop her one-woman show, the award-winning “James Joyce’s Women,” which she played locally in 1978, 1979 and 1980 and reprised in a film she produced in 1985.

“I suppose I am associated with being Irish,” she said. “But I’ve also done a lot of American roles on television--and people seem to have found that acceptable. Perhaps (the resistance to mainstream casting) is a reflection of that difficulty about the Irish people, the whole Irish event. After all, what we’re best known for is leaving our own country. Emigration in famine time, for political reasons. People leave. That’s the one tradition you can count on.”

So is national pride.

“One thing I’m attempting through this play,” she said, “is that the Irish experience be taken seriously. I think it’s absolutely not taken seriously. Bing Crosby and Barry Fitzgerald did us a tremendous disservice because they put forward these stereotypes of a type of Irish person.

“They’re images people can find endearing--without having to be provoked or look beyond them: the priest who looks after lost boys, the interesting old man who sits by the fire smoking his pipe, the woman who scrubs floors and says rosary and is circumspect at all times. That’s hardly the extent of the Irish experience.”