Curtain Call

Irish eyes

By Jay Weitz

Never has a new Columbus theater company landed a coup this big. Carrickmacross Productions, founded in 2006 by Clintonville residents Lisa and Kevin McClatchy, will present Tom Cruise in their first stage production, Stones in His Pockets by Irish playwright Marie Jones.

Well, not Cruise himself, but a character that is said to represent him when he was in the Ron Howard film Far and Away. And the character is a woman. And she is played by a man.

So, OK, maybe it's not such a huge coup after all. Considering the current economic environment, however, the first production of a new theater company is news itself.

Since its founding, Carrickmacross Productions has focused on film, according to Kevin McClatchy.

"The first project we started was an anthology of short films dealing with PTSD in returning military vets," he said in an e-mail interview. "Our aim with the film side is to create socially conscious narrative films that are professional and entertaining. We've completed the first film and are doing pre-production on the next. The theater side is more specifically concerned with the Irish experience."

Both McClatchys share an Irish heritage, and they named their company after the town in County Monaghan, not far from the border with Northern Ireland, from which Lisa's family hails.

Stones in His Pockets, an award-winning play written by Jones in 1999, had a successful Broadway run in 2001. Set in rural County Kerry, Ireland, Stones recounts a small town's takeover by a Hollywood film crew, and the resulting cultural clash and reactions of all involved.

What's been so celebrated about the play is that all 15 of its characters — young and old, male and female, and including the aforementioned Cruise clone — are played by two actors. In the Carrickmacross production, being staged at MadLab starting tonight, those two actors are Jon Osbeck and Kevin McClatchy.

Osbeck is known to Columbus audiences from appearances in MadLab's Theatre Roulette, Women At Play's Hungry Hearts and Acting in Columbus' Test Drive, and he's appeared in several independent films.

Kevin McClatchy was in the 2003 Red Herring production of Donald Margulies' Dinner with Friends, and has been seen regularly on both daytime TV (Guiding Light, Another World) and primetime (X-Files, ER).

OSU faculty member Jimmy Bohr, who directed the 2007 OSU staging of Our Town and whose career has several times crossed that of McClatchy, will direct.

Although Osbeck and McClatchy play the two main characters of Stones, a pair of extras who become friends on the film set, the play involves an unusual acting challenge.

"Having six or seven other characters to create and give reality is daunting," McClatchy admitted. "We've concentrated on the physicality of the characters much more than usual, finding ways to make them all distinct and clear, since there are no costume changes or exits and entrances. Jimmy Bohr has been invaluable in that regard, as well as patient."

About the Irish playwright, McClatchy said, "Marie Jones is great at dealing with thorny, serious issues in a hugely entertaining way. Stones deals with, How do you maintain hope in the face of despair? But it does so in an often funny way."

Given the McClatchys' intimacy with the worlds of both film and stage, as well as the play's Irish background, "It seemed to be exactly what Lisa and I hoped to begin to explore."

By the way, if Lisa McClatchy's name is familiar, it's because she and illustrator Tammie Lyon are responsible for more than half a dozen of the Eloise books that have been written since the death a decade ago of children's book author Kay Thompson.

So although Tom Cruise won't be around, one of the current "parents" of Eloise, the little girl who lives in New York's Plaza Hotel, will be. And in smart circles, Eloise beats Cruise any day.

June 19, 2008

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