"Brendan," making its world premiere at the Boston Center for the Arts, also follows "The Atheist" in the Huntington Theatre Company's season, and seeing them in quick succession emphasizes their differences. Where "The Atheist" was a furiously swift and vitriolically witty one-man rant, "Brendan" places its central character in the midst of complicated relationships: with fellow Irish immigrants in Boston, with the American women he pursues with touching awkwardness, and most of all with his mother back home.
Brendan's relationship with Mammy is particularly complex, not least because she's dead. As the lights go up, we hear a letter from Brendan's sister, Ashling, that breaks the news with fearsome plainness: "Mammy died last week and we buried her three days ago. She wouldn't let me tell you until after she was buried and that was her way. You know yourself."
The first of those lines will become a kind of mournful chorus throughout the intermissionless play, interrupting and overshadowing the new world in which Brendan is trying to make himself at home. As Brendan listens to classical music in his apartment, drinks a Bud at the local bar, tentatively woos a shy downstairs neighbor, and learns to drive, the woman who reads these opening lines stays right with him, invisible to everyone but him and us.
She's identified only as "Woman," but there's no mistaking the maternal irritation and concern in her voice as she tells her son to comb his hair, exhorts him to find a nice girl and settle down, or comments on his choice of friends and employment with wonderfully understated sarcasm. There's love between these two, clearly, but also a lot of old pain - and all of it, in a way that feels irreducibly Irish, is expressed sideways, through wry jokes and dry understatement. Their ongoing conversation is lyrical, but in a crisply distilled and absolutely unpretentious way.
