Tragic Losses, of Life and Language, in Watch Night and Translations

“Justice needs a witness,” the scholar Paul Woodruff wrote. “A body of witnesses makes possible a communal healing of wounds.” These “traditions of public judgment,” he asserts, are “the ancestors of tragic theater.” Right now, within very different dramatic containers, two productions are bearing tragic witness to great fissures in justice itself — wounds that, old or new or ongoing, feel raw and deep, incompletely healed, if at all. Watch Night — co-conceived by its director and choreographer, Bill T. Jones, and its librettist, Marc Bamuthi Joseph — combines opera, movement theater, and, in Joseph’s words, “the interdisciplinary nature of [the] hip-hop generation” to address the mass shootings by white supremacists at both the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston and the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. And at the Irish Rep, a revival of Brian Friel’s 1980 play, Translations (directed by Doug Hughes as part of the theater’s yearlong Friel Project), is turning a wry, unblinking gaze on the violent project of linguistic imperialism undertaken by the British Army in Ireland. Thirty years after the failed Irish Rebellion of 1798, and only a decade before the famine that would annihilate much of the country’s population, Ireland was overrun by British soldiers ordered to draw a new map of the country and to Anglicize its place-names, down to the last crossroads and inlet. It was a psychologically and physically brutal operation, and the Irish language is still recovering: In 1845, about 4.5 million people spoke Irish, and today there are roughly 72,000 fluent speakers.

Both Watch Night and Translations are, in their ways, concerned with massacres — the destruction of life and of culture wrought by racist and colonialist power. Both aim to create rituals if not of catharsis — can we really walk away from these things feeling that we’ve purged ourselves? — then of attention: Here we are together, publicly acknowledging these wounds. But whereas Translations begins with nuanced, specific human beings, gradually unfurling around its characters into a gorgeous and doomed blossom, the ambitious but garbled Watch Night leans on tropes and underexplored refrains. Weighed down by the gravity of its material, it feels airless and ponderous — not a glass that shines new light on, as its characters repeat, “American rage” but a muddled collage of talking points.

That said, there’s a lot packed into Watch Night. The project began as a response to the murders in Charleston; then, during its development, the shooting at Tree of Life synagogue occurred and, according to Bill Rauch — the artistic director of the Perelman Performing Arts Center, who commissioned the piece — “further complicated … the project’s trajectory.” Complicated it, yes — strengthened it, less so. Watch Night wants to wrap itself around anti-Black violence, antisemitic violence, questions of forgiveness and redemption (and their different interpretations in the Jewish and southern Black Christian traditions), questions of revenge and vigilantism, media cynicism and exploitation, spiritual ancestry, trauma, the existence of evil, the loss of faith, the grooming of white supremacists in the dark corners of the internet — the list feels like it gets longer with each scene. The play is less a coherent drama than a box containing a jumble of Important Things to Address — a 500-plus-piece puzzle in which the pieces have often been jammed together no matter how they fit.

It doesn’t help that in the attempt to find a spine to hold together all these extremely heavy agenda items, Joseph and Jones have hung them on a cliché. At the center of Watch Night is Josh (Brandon Michael Nase), a reporter whose beat is “race-based rage,” and, as he says — sounding savvy and cynical, because that’s what reporters are — “business is boomin’.” Josh is headed to Charleston, after a fictionalized version of the shooting there, to get the scoop. He keeps singing (throughout the show’s intermissionless almost two hours) about how he knows his “next story is gonna be ready-made for Hollywood.” Josh’s father was Black and his mother was Jewish, and he’s got a younger brother, Saul (Arri Lawton Simon), whose job is to be the flat good angel on his shoulder. Saul is constantly texting Josh to advise him against the venal path he’s treading. If you’re wondering whether, at some point, Saul sings to him, “Am I not my brother’s keeper?,” the answer is yes.

Then, the turn: Josh’s mercenary project is tragically complicated when a copycat attack occurs at his brother’s synagogue. (Although the real Pittsburgh shooting took place in 2018, three years after the shooting at Emanuel AME, the show puts its massacres back-to-back and has the second, unseen killer be “inspired” by the first, here called the Wolf, played with sullen-white-boy impenetrability by Kevin Csolak.) Here, the show would seem to be setting up for the stock cynic-grows-a-conscience story line. To its credit, Watch Night doesn’t move exactly in this direction, though the path it chooses instead isn’t necessarily a stronger or clearer one. In the wake of the second shooting, we watch the agonies of both Josh and his parallel protagonist, Shayla (a vocally robust Danyel Fulton), a member of the Charleston church who works as a prison guard on death row and, conveniently, has jurisdiction over the man who murdered her fellow congregants. Shayla is grappling with whether she’s capable of forgiveness, Josh with whether he’s capable of repentance. The path for both looks grim.

As Shayla and Josh struggle and brood (without ever doing that much changing), Watch Night ends up lyrically and musically spinning its wheels. Tamar-kali’s score — which draws on beatboxing, body percussion, Hebrew worship music, and African American spirituals along with its operatic influences — feels busy and referential but also frequently monotonous, too full of reverence to find much lift or drive. Similarly, Joseph’s lyrics tend to get trapped in repetitive eddies. When they do make a move to shove the story along, the narrative developments are often both hackneyed and strangely nonsensical. If “business is boomin’” for Josh, then why does it seem as though the morally bankrupt act of turning this particular killer into a media celebrity is his only way to avoid real bankruptcy? In the wake of all his strutting, his fretting — “I have no story / I’m broke” — feels false. And in what world does Josh live where the story of a mass shooting is “something Brad Pitt and Matt Damon would option”? As Watch Night itself exemplifies, these stories are extraordinarily difficult to stage effectively — not exactly commercial-box-office catnip.

That subcutaneous muddiness pervades the show. On the surface, its characters make what seem like big bold statements (“Jesus died in the Blackest way possible / With his hands up / At the hands of the state”) — key phrases from their pronouncements are even echoed in large print in Lucy Mackinnon’s projections, a gesture that comes off as heavy-handed and pedantic, as if the production is telling us what to underline in our textbooks. But beneath these broad strokes, Watch Night’s arguments are woolly. Take Ms. Summers (Jill Paice), the Wolf’s tenth-grade English teacher. Her lyrics are so meandering and ambiguous that it’s genuinely hard to tell if she’s defending her former pupil, mourning for him, or condemning him — let alone if she’s meant to be speaking out against the sins of the South or embodying them. Paice plays her as one color — regretful and demure — and it’s an opaque one. (She’s hardly alone here: None of the ensemble members are given highly dimensional figures to work with.) And, again, she’s saddled with unhelpfully trite ideas. The Wolf, she sings, “was an average student / But he was a brilliant artist / A photographer and a poet.” “Murder he wrote,” replies Shayla, in total seriousness. Which would almost be funny (granted, unintentionally) if the idea of the Dylann Roofs of the world as “brilliant,” creative souls weren’t riddled with issues, its banality only one of them.

Although Jones’s choreography is at times lithe and forceful — especially in some of the sequences featuring the show’s chorus, a group of nameless characters collectively known as the Echo Chamber — there’s no single element that helps to pull the fuzzy mélange of Watch Night into sharp focus. Capital-T Themes are hammered home without being cracked open (after two hours of singing about forgiveness, we’ve essentially learned that some people can forgive and others can’t), and despite Josh’s early moments of slightly more upbeat, smirking ambition, the overall sensation is that of a dirge. While Watch Night aspires to the communal witnessing of tragedy, it doesn’t take us anywhere in the process. It’s so burdened by its own pall that it ends up walking in place.

The creators of Watch Night are hardly the first to go up against such gnarly subject matter and end up in a bit of a mess. Although, as Friel’s old schoolmaster, Hugh Mor O’Donnell, says in Translations, “Confusion is not an ignoble condition.” Underplayed beautifully by Seán McGinley — with an alchemy of lofty intellectual grandeur and vulnerable, messy weakness of the flesh — Hugh has run a hedge school in the (fictional) northern Irish town of Baile Beag for 30 years. Well, these days, his son Manus (a wonderful, gentle yet simmering Owen Campbell) does most of the running of it. Manus walks with a limp because his father, who is never without a nip of something in his coat pocket, “fell across his cradle” when he was a baby. Now, though his own body is a site of constant struggle, he keeps his father propped up, manages the household, and, when Hugh is tipsily in absentia, teaches the local aspirants to education — a motley, affectionate crew that includes the rambunctious duo Bridget and Doalty (Oona Roche and Owen Laheen); waifish and speech-impaired Sarah (Erin Wilhelmi); hardworking, farsick, and flame-headed Maire (Mary Wiseman); and the raggedy, Homer-quoting trickster Jimmy Jack (a marvelous John Keating), who probably sleeps in a stable but who’s fluent in Greek and dreams of proposing marriage to Pallas Athena.

Baile Beag is an Irish-speaking community, and a great part of the joy of Translations lies in Friel’s dexterity in creating a play that he himself said “has to do with language and only language,” where the action of the title is of such vital and brutal significance, yet the dialogue is entirely in English for an English-speaking audience. (Apart, that is, from some soaring leaps into Latin and Greek — Hugh’s hedge school is a classical academy in the grand Platonic tradition.) Doug Hughes’s graceful production projects the settings for each act across the luminous wall of sky at the back of Charlie Corcoran’s set, first in Irish, then English. But apart from this quiet act of reclamation in the show’s framing, the play itself is, in its essence, an acknowledgment of the vast damage done by the events it depicts. Its vocabulary is its tragedy — it’s presented in the language of the colonizer because the colonizer won.

Yet it’s beautiful. That’s the generous irony planted at the heart of Translations — that it reveals the English language as the weapon of empire and then makes poetry of it. “You’ll find, sir,” says Hugh to the romantic young British soldier, Lieutenant Yolland (Raffi Barsoumian, nailing half-charming, half-infuriating manly naïveté), “that certain cultures expend on their vocabularies and syntax acquisitive energies and ostentations entirely lacking in their material lives.” Language is the greatest wealth the inhabitants of Baile Beag possess, and Friel spreads its riches across the stage, crowns his characters with its jewels, even as they stand defenseless in the face of impending and devastating theft.

We can — and should — say what we like about busting through old narrative structures, but the fact remains that plays like Translations are irrefutably well made, built with purpose in every brick, with the sturdy mortar of character holding the house together. The play may “[have] to do with language,” but it’s about people. Its big ideas come to us through bodies, their desires, their self-deception, their heartbreak. When the British Army arrives in Baile Beag, it brings with it a prodigal son: Owen (Seth Numrich, gussied up and glinting), Hugh’s younger boy, who has been away in Dublin for six years. He blows back into town full of breezy charisma and belief in progress. He’s working for the Brits now, and as he tells his father and brother, “My job is to translate the quaint, archaic tongue you people persist in speaking into the King’s good English.” As in Watch Night, two brothers circle each other at the center of Translations, one nonchalantly cynical and forward-looking, the other serious, earnest, and devoted to preserving a deep ancestral identity. But while Josh and Saul are singing ciphers, Owen and Manus are complex and whole. Owen isn’t a villain, and Manus isn’t a hero: Another of the play’s tragedies is that they do love each other and they both desperately want to be loved — Owen by everyone, Manus by “curly-headed Maire” — but a fuse has been lit with the arrival of the British, and it’s only a matter of time before the bang.

Wiseman is radiant as frustrated, yearning Maire, who cares for a brood of younger siblings and works her hands raw in the potato fields. Of course she dreams of escape; of course she wants to learn English. And of course — poor Manus — her eyes will fill with stars at the arrival of a handsome young British lieutenant, who seems so much kinder than his ramrod-straight superior officer (Rufus Collins, his white mustache dripping with superiority) and who swoons at the green hills of Baile Beag (and at its “quaint, archaic tongue”). Lieutenant Yolland is a kind of Freddy Eynsford-Hill whose Eliza is Ireland. He’s good-hearted and genuinely besotted, and he might even have the makings of a better man within him, but he’s also blind to how infantilizing his infatuation is and how much it’s tied up with the prejudices of his own privileged upbringing. He wants to live like common people.

But then Friel gives Yolland and Maire a love scene. And not only is it very funny (both actors are speaking English, but in the world of the play, Maire only speaks Irish and the characters can’t understand each other at all) — it’s also exquisitely moving. Its delicate, humorous lyricism is another embodiment of Translations’ big-souled complexity. The play’s tragedy strikes as deep as it does because it makes room, within and intertwined with the act of violence to which it is bearing witness, for so much beauty.

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