A Gaping Generation Gap

“Kevin’s Bed,” an Irish comedy with a lacerating edge, has its United States premiere tonight at the Laguna Playhouse’s Moulton Theater, and the director and playwright are at seeming odds over just what it’s about.

“It was more universal than it was Irish. That was one of the things I liked about it,” says Andrew Barnicle, the Laguna Playhouse artistic director who fell for it two years ago during a play-scouting trip to England and Dublin.

“I really wanted to write about the changing Ireland,” says playwright Bernard Farrell, who has cranked out 17 plays the past 20 years, many of them hits at Dublin’s leading theater, the Abbey. “In a sense, the Gillespie family [the play’s focus] is a microcosm for Irish people in general, who have spent generations telling lies to one another.”

By setting his play on a couple’s 25th and 50th wedding anniversaries, Farrell aimed to show the difference between what he calls the “post-colonial” mentality of the 1970s, when Ireland was still caught in the distorting aftereffects of its long history of suffering and subjugation, and a burgeoning “new Ireland” with a mind-set full of confidence born of the isle’s late-’90s economic boom and hip cultural exports such as “Riverdance” and the rock band U2.

Of course, director and playwright are right. “Kevin’s Bed” is universal in its portrayal of how parents can inflict rigid expectations on their children with crippling results. And it is distinctly Irish in the particular expectations and hobbling outcomes it portrays, amid religious hang-ups, humor, blarney and a love of song.

“The post-colonial mind-set is still there in the older generation and my generation, and the scars of that still show,” Farrell, 58, said last week from his home in Greystones, County Wicklow, south of Dublin. He was due in Laguna this week for the American premiere of “Kevin’s Bed,” one of a handful of professional productions his work has received in the United States. “The present generation are very confident and proud of being Irish and have never known a time when being Irish was inflicted on people as being an embarrassment.”

Farrell is all for “the new confidence, the in-your-face Ireland. But the confidence is very young, only 7 or 8 years old at the most. The old style is still there. We’re in a learning frame. Maybe the change needs another 25 years.”

In that respect, “Kevin’s Bed” serves as a cautionary tale against backsliding. Dan and Doris Gillespie, the anniversary celebrators, are from the old school. Kevin, their younger son, goes through contortions to please them, then more contortions to try to disguise the fact that, far from realizing their dream for him to become a Roman Catholic priest, he is about to become a father, lowercase.

Kevin proves a comically inept liar; his brother, John, comes to grief as a terrible hypocrite. In what Farrell sees as a typically old-Irish coping mechanism, Dan and Doris put up a protective front of pretense that turns their dutiful sons into psychic pretzels.

Kevin ends badly, but his dad, the real blarney expert in the family, gets his way with a big fib. The play’s strong current of hope comes from Kevin’s daughter, Cecily, who, though pregnant and unattached, is free of the old guilt and pretense. In a bets-hedging twist that reflects his uncertainty whether the new Ireland is yet sufficiently established, Farrell imagines that Cecily’s hopes and that of another forward-looking character, Kevin’s old flame, Betty, hinge on their ability to escape Ireland.

Farrell, who exuded all the amiability and conversational charm you would expect of an Irish wordsmith, says that anger fires his imagination and his prolific pen.

“I just go from one thing to the next and the barrel is not empty,” Farrell said. “I guess there are enough things I’m angry about that I want to write about them. People think that’s a contradiction because most of the plays are quite comedic, but I think that’s a good form to be angry in. I always think there is a cake to be eaten that I have baked, and there is an ingredient in it that is hard to take, and so the icing goes on. This one there’s a fair bit of icing, but it’s tart and people will get the savagery of what’s going on.”

Farrell did not become involved in the theater until his mid-30s, after a friend asked him to tag along to an amateur actors and playwrights workshop that met weekly at the Lantern theater in Dublin.

For most of his adult life he had worked as a clerk for a passenger shipping line that ferries folks between Ireland and Wales. He had followed his father into the business. But a love of theater came early: The Farrells didn’t take their children to the movies, but to the theater.

In 1978, Farrell wrote his first play, “I Do Not Like Thee Dr. Fell,” and sent it--unsolicited--to the Abbey Theatre. The account of an Irish therapeutic encounter group premiered in 1979 and became a hit. On the day in 1980 when the Abbey accepted his second play, “Canaries,” Farrell marched straight to the shipping company office and quit to become a professional playwright.

He has written television series for the BBC and Irish television.

Farrell is keen on joining the corps of contemporary playwrights who have scored hits in the U.S. with Irish subjects--among them Hugh Leonard (“Da”), Brian Friel (“Dancing at Lughnasa”) and Martin McDonagh (“The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” which recently played to packed houses during its West Coast premiere run on South Coast Repertory’s Second Stage). But he isn’t pining for it.

“It doesn’t keep me awake at night, but at the same time it would be nice if it did travel in that way,” he said. “I am a bit sorry they haven’t been exposed to audiences in the United States. I think they would enjoy them and that [the plays] would move them.”

Veteran Orange County playgoers are among the few Yanks who have had a peek at Farrell’s work: South Coast Repertory staged “All in Favour Said No!” in 1982.

“Kevin’s Bed” may bid good riddance to the old Ireland, but Farrell doesn’t seem to lack for material to stoke his angrily comic imagination in the new one.

“So much of this new affluence makes me angry--the way all sorts of standards dip as money comes into the equation. We have a refugee problem. For the first time in our lives, we are seeing people in this country with a different-color skin, who can’t speak English, working in hotels and restaurants. There is an attitude--”Send them home”--which is very ironic coming from a nation that has been welcomed everywhere in the world when we had nowhere to go. The other downside is the development. If you let the developers at it they will just raze everything to put up an ugly building.”

It sounds as if Farrell is on track to remain very Irish yet, for Americans, very universal.

BE THERE

“Kevin’s Bed,” by Bernard Farrell, at the Laguna Playhouse’s Moulton Theater, 606 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach. Tonight through May 14. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday matinees, 2 p.m. $21 to $40. (949) 497-2787.