Billy Meleady and Colin Hamell play Mojo and Mickybo and a host of other characters that represent the different facets of their lives: parents and neighbors, friends and strangers. Meleady captures the openness of youth as Mojo, then makes it seem easy to shift into distant and sometimes menacing characters. Hamell is equally adept as Mickybo, delivering a vivid performance that arcs from tender to tainted when violence ultimately divides the boys.
Director Carmel O'Reilly expertly guides Hamell and Meleady through a rapid and challenging mix of Belfast accents and identities, all without any aid from prop or costume changes. You have to admire the confident pace, even if you wish, as the 17 characters flash by, that you were getting a deeper sense of some of them. With all the twists and turns of McCafferty's play packed into one act, there are precious few opportunities to catch up.
A simple yet effective set by J. Michael Griggs serves as a mixture of playground and picture frame for the action. Elements of Griggs's set are evocative of an old cinema with decayed, or perhaps bombed-out, edges that provide hideouts and other locations for Mojo and Mickybo's tale.
While much of the dialogue is filtered through the mouths and minds of young Mojo and Mickybo, the subject matter is far from childlike. Their imaginative world of cowboys and superheroes repeatedly crashes into the real one of riots and rubber bullets. McCafferty capitalizes on the tension between the complex happenings in the boys' lives and the basic vocabulary they use to describe them, all the while establishing immediate links between the two as they play characters from each other's most intimate relationships.
The ultimate trade-off for all the immediacy is a powerful play that happens a bit too quickly and is over a bit too soon.
Mojo Mickybo
A play in one act by OwenMcCafferty
Directed by: Carmel O’Reilly.
Set, J. Michael Griggs. Lights, Tess James. Costumes, Sarah Chapman.
Sound, Matt Griffin. Presented by the Sugan Theatre Company.
At: Boston Center for the Arts, through April 24. 617-426-2787, www.sugan.org
