The New Electric Ballroom

“Nothing’s moving because nothing’s real,” says the fortyish Ada (Catherine Walsh), lost, like everyone in Enda Walsh’s new play, in one of her logorrheic reveries. “Like I’m standing on a picture of a beach and not the beach itself.” It’s a neat line, elegant and tastefully postmodern, but also, alas, a commentary on the work as a whole: The New Electric Ballroom is aridly artificial and smugly hermetic, and it doesn’t move.

There is, admittedly, rigor and craft in this visiting production by Druid Ireland, which also brought us The Cripple of Inishmaan last season. But unlike his countrymen Martin McDonagh and Conor McPherson, Walsh eschews accessible narrative and dialogue, writing in a pseudo-Beckettian vein of babbling stage constructs that are hard to accept as fleshed characters. Lyricism flows through their windy perorations, and they seem to suffer bitterly from past trauma, but Walsh’s dramaturgical strategy (evidenced in last year’s The Walworth Farce) is to use ritual activity, chunks of self-conscious blather and contrived, obsessive reenactments. Such an expressionistic investigation of language and memory could be engaging and even affecting, but one never gets around to caring about Walsh’s afflicted wraiths.

The New Electric Ballroom takes place in an abstract space in which three sisters live a cloistered existence as they alternately nurse and rip open some old wound. Two older sisters (Ruth McCabe, Rosaleen Linehan) seem to have competed for the affection of a local fisherman-lothario at the titular dance hall decades ago. Was one of them impregnated? Or just spurned? The younger sister, Ada, is the most dogged reenactor of that fateful night, forcing her siblings to don costumes and remember their speeches. A motormouthed and simpleminded fishmonger (Mikel Murfi) bursts in to deliver the day’s catch, and he’s dragged into their folie à trois. Staged by the author as if we were in a pink-accented psych ward, this 80-minute exercise is attractive to look at and fervently acted, but it needs a stronger current to set any gears in motion.—David Cote

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