Irish Proverbs for St. Patrick’s Day

“Is maith an scéalaí an aimsir.”

Translation: “Time is a good story teller.”

Meaning: Stories become embellished with time

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“Is iad na muca ciúine a itheann an mhin.”

Translation: “It’s the quiet pigs that eat the grain.”

Meaning: It’s those who are quiet that you don’t suspect.

Similar: “It’s always the quiet ones.”

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“Bíonn súil le muir ach ní bhíonn súil le tír”

Translation: “There is hope from the sea but no hope from land”

Meaning: The land, here, is the grave. If someone is lost at sea, you can go on hoping, but if they are buried all hope is gone.

Alternative version: “Bíonn dúil le béal farraige ach cha bhíonn dúil le béal uaighe”.

Meaning: “There is hope from the mouth of the sea, but none from the mouth of the grave”

 

“Go Irish” News and Miller’s Views on Fitzgerald

Apparently, the South Camden Theater Company in New Jersey is once again producing a short run of Go Irish: The Purgatory Diaries of Jason Miller, the existential play that I wrote with Tom Flannery; the Camden has already staged the one-man show, back in March of 2007, I believe it was.

I appreciate all of the hard work that actor Bob Hughes (a friend and high school classmate of Miller’s in Scranton, PA) has put into staging the drama anywhere he can find a venue and I have no doubt that the Camden’s reprise of Go Irish is due to the new Broadway revival of Miller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, That Championship Season (with a cast that includes Kiefer Sutherland and Jason Patric, Miller’s son and literary executor).

And while I remain proud that the work is slowly finding an audience, the version that Bob is running with is a version of the text that has been savagely gutted by Flannery, who I drafted to add some Scranton color to the play after I had begun working on it in 2004.

Most of the material I wrote about F. Scott Fitzgerald, for instance, has been stripped completely, which produced the effect of removing the leit-motif of the drama: Go Irish, as I penned it, is not so much a biographical of the tragic Jason Miller’s life and career but a meditation on the myth and reality of the dissipated Catholic, Irish-American writer.

The following monologue — including Miller’s own words from a 1972 interview — is nowhere to be found in the current text, which is nothing short of a travesty. You would think that Hughes and Flannery would realize the contemporary relevance of the dialogue, which I will let you judge for yourself.

JASON MILLER ON SCOTT FITZGERALD: “A LOT OF WEEDS GOT IN THERE”

Fitzgerald … I played him in a movie once, you know, one of those made-for-TV deals, back in ’76 I think it was, when they were still making quality movies for the tube. Some critics said I was the best personification of Fitzgerald on screen – not too hard when my only competition to date was Richard Chamberlain in another TV flick and Gregory Peck in that God awful potboiler “Beloved Infidel”. The truth of the matter is I just hit my marks and said my lines and it didn’t hurt that I had Tuesday Weld for a co-star.

Only forty-four years old when he died of a massive heart attack, Fitzgerald was  desperately trying to make it as a screenwriter in Hollywood, laboring under the mistaken impression that he was a forgotten has-been.

Fitzgerald — When he tried to get into films, he never felt he belonged. He never fucking belonged in Hollywood. He began to feel the fire was starting to go. He had monetary problems, a smashed marriage, a sick wife. All this, plus as ebbing talent. And the guilt. Didn’t tend to his own garden. A lot of weeds got in there.

Curiously enough, as much as he wrote about the rich, I really believe he hated them. I believe he despised them in some other level of his being. His decline really started with the Wall Street Crash in 1929. You can time it. The world was no longer interested in the rich as escapists. The rich put this country goddamn near the brink of destruction. The rich were jumping out of windows. They no longer were the myths that fascinated people. We were beginning to question these people, and we weren’t liking what we found. But this was his milieu. And when that world collapsed, his talent collapsed. He couldn’t find other fertile ground to lay his seed in. He was trapped within his fatal attraction to the rich, not only in their life-style, but in their literary value to him. He mined that vein, and when that vein went, he went.

The beautiful thing about it was that he made a desperate lunge in Hollywood, a tragically sad attempt to change his life. He endured incredible humiliations to try to get back on top. The man who had been the center of the fucking world was slipping into anonymity and obscurity.

He had that kind of romantic fatalism where women became myths and goddesses to him, and then they became all too human. There was no balance. Fitzgerald was a total extremist. He was one of the last of the true romantics. His skull should have cracked open on a pyre in Malibu. He and Zelda flew too near the sun, the both of them. They flew too fucking near the sun, and whoosh! (Beat) You know, I never used to cuss like this until I went to Hollywood. It’s true. I hate Hollywood, the whole damn slippery, cash-lubricated machine. You get there by standing out….and once you make it you spend all your time trying to fit in. That should explain the extensive mental illness found there.

William Valentine Shakespeare: The Merchant of Menace

On Wednesday night, while doing some online research for the Jason Miller novella, I discovered a bit of fascinating ephemera that borders the sports and literary worlds: William Valentine Shakespeare (1912-74) was a a famed halfback for the Notre Dame Fighting Irish football team from 1933-35.

Because of his shared name with the other William Shakespeare, the sporting press dubbed Bill The Bard of Staten Island, The Bard of South Bend, and The Merchant of Menace. Shakespeare was a key player on November 2, 1935, when Notre Dame faced the undefeated 1935 Ohio State Buckeyes in front of a crowd of 81,000 at Ohio Stadium:

The 1935 Notre Dame-Ohio State match was regarded as one of the greatest comebacks in history of the sport. Red Barber, who broadcast the game on radio, later called it “the greatest college football game I ever called.” In The New York Times, Allison Danzig opened his report on the game by writing, “One of the greatest last-ditch rallies in football history toppled the dreaded Scarlet Scourge of Ohio State from its lofty pinnacle today as 81,000 dumbfounded spectators saw Notre Dame score three touchdowns in less than fifteen minutes to gain an almost miraculous 18–13 victory in jammed Buckeye Stadium.” Radio announcer Tom Manning added, “I always said Shakespeare had a pair of rosary beads and a bottle of holy water in his back pocket.”

The media picked up stories of the Catholic faithful praying for Notre Dame as they listened to the game on the radio. One nun told a reporter of overhearing a colleague in her convent “gamefully bargaining” and eventually “threatening” the Poor Souls and saints for another Notre Dame touchdown. The Chicago Tribune later noted the irony that it was a truly ecumenical group that combined for the famed “Hail Mary” pass: “Manziotti a Catholic, handed to Shakespeare, a Protestant on a fake reverse. Shakespeare passed to End Wayne Millner, a Jewish boy.” In 1969, as part of the centennial of the first college football game, the Associated Press conducted a poll to select the “game of the century”, and the 1935 Notre Dame-Ohio State game was chosen as the best game in the first 100 years of college football.

But that’s not the most interesting aspect of Bill Shakespeare’s career as an American football player for the Fighting Irish. No. It gets better:

The week after the Ohio State game, Notre Dame faced Northwestern featuring All-American end Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Before the game, the Associated Press carried a story profiling the two players: “Shakespeare and Longfellow will meet tomorrow —- not to trade verses, but to play all the football they know.” Longfellow later recalled, “Shakespeare and I played against each other for three years. Each year, because of our names, we got a terrific buildup. It was a natural, I suppose. All through my college days I never heard the end of it. The writers went wilder each year.” Longfellow got the better of Shakespeare in 1935, as he caught a touchdown pass to help Northwestern win the game, 14-7. Shakespeare attempted to lead the Irish to another come-from-behind victory, as he ran 48 yard to the Northwestern ten-yard line late in the game, but the Northwestern defense held. On the last play of the game, Shakespeare threw a “long, desperate pass”, but it was intercepted as time ran out.

This is research material that is definitely going in the novella; fact is truly stranger than fiction.

 

“Go Irish” and the “Championship” Revival

“When I play him (Jason Miller), my subtext is that this is a doomed man,” actor Bob Hughes told the Bucks County (PA) Courier Times in September 2009. “”He had his reasons why he needed to ease the pain of his life and I’m certainly not going to judge his use of narcotics or his use of alcohol.”

Bob is referring to his tireless work presenting my play (co-written with Tom Flannery), Go Irish: The Purgatory Diaries of Jason Miller, anywhere he can find a venue that will support the one-man show, beginning with the 2007 premiere at the Northeast Theater in Scranton, Miller’s hometown.

Miller, who dropped dead of a heart attack in one of his favorite haunts, Farley’s Pub, in downtown Scranton on May 13, 2001, won a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony award for his 1972 play That Championship Season, as well as a New York Drama Critics Award, and was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar in his film debut as Father Damien Karras in the 1973 film, The Exorcist. My play, which has been presented as part of the Live Arts Festival and the Philly Fringe Festival, concerns the fate of Miller’s soul in the afterlife, where he must account for his wasted talent … in writing in a notebook.

Bob Hughes grew up with Miller in Scranton and knew him until the day the gifted writer, actor, and director died.

“This is a fairytale (for me),” Hughes told the Courier Times. “Your best friend goes to the brink of success, nosedives off the Hollywood sign, and then you get a chance to re-enact his life on stage — how many actors get a chance to play their best friend from high school?”

Last year, around the time that our eviction problems began looming, Bob called me incessantly to tell me that he had heard rumors that a Broadway revival of Miller’s Championship Season was in the offing; he was hoping that a new production of the play might spur more interest in Go Irish. Later, he called and left a message telling me that the rumors were true, that a production was planned for the Spring of 2011.

I haven’t talked to Bob in the last six months; but yesterday, while thumbing through the Arts section of the New York Times — the print edition, which runs six bucks here on the west coast — I noticed that the revival of Championship is indeed underway and in previews. The venue for the new production? The Jacobs Theatre.