Sunday, February 19, 2017

KICKING THE OLD MAN, and how it relates to ST. PATRICK'S DAY another day in Dublin


               In ST. PATRICK'S DAY another day in Dublin, the narrator sees put on a very short play he wrote, A BEAUTIFUL GOOD WHOLESOME GIRL, a curtain raiser to the first student production in Ireland of Samuel Beckett's ENDGAME.  

                 The play was produced by DramSoc  the student theatre at University College, Dublin.  Beckett himself gave permission for the production and one might think he had taken a tiny ironic pleasure in this as he went to Trinity College, Dublin as his Protestant class background dictated while he well knew James Joyce had gone to this other college, founded by Newman and where Gerard Manley Hopkins taught classics and my little play was performed in the complex where the famous argument between the priest and Stephen takes place in A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN

            I did write another play which had come out of this little poem and the thought of my dead father:  KICKING THE OLD MAN.  

          I showed the play to two people and one theatre.  I never heard from the theatre and Roger Dixon, a classmate from Beloit who did direct  dismissed it as psychodrama.  

The play's second reader was John Benson who was a bartender at The 55, the bar on Christopher Street in NYC.  He had had a small role in THE BLOB and directed summer stock.  He thought the play funny and sad and well worth putting on...  but of course where and and and... 

          I used  a few pages from the play at the beginning and end of JUST LIKE THAT... another unpublished book  that I think of as about THE end of the so-called Sixties of the last century.  The Notre Dame Review some years ago published a section from this book centered upon the narrator's life encounter with Anthony Burgess

                              FOUR

down the street
down the street
as hard as you can
           kicking the old man
           kicking the old man 
down the street
down the street
           he knows and looks

kicking my old man
          as hard as you can

down the street 
down the street
         laughing at you 
         laughing at you
kicking my old man 
kicking my old man
           as hard as you can 
           as hard as you can
                     kicking me 
kicking me
with a smile 

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Nice poem! Love the ending.