Somewhere Out There You at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin
As I’m packing up after a long trip to Ireland, I’m listening to the NPR station here in New York City which is playing a promotion for donations featuring the pop songs of my adolescence, when the top tunes were what I raced home from school to hear on the radio: DOO WOP AND SOUL. I didn’t know that this was the title for this new music bursting out in the late 1950s, but I knew it spoke as nothing else had (except for 19th-century poetry) for the aching, nameless longing of my young years.
Listening to these long-forgotten but amazingly familiar tunes, I’m remembering the high point of my visit in Dublin last week: Nancy Harris’ play at the Abbey Theatre, founded more than a hundred years ago by Lady Douglas. The title bewildered me but became clear as the funny, touching play performed on a stripped stage—that we see too seldom in this time of over-produced shows—the plot connects to these songs and the speechless, never-satisfied longing of those years.
Never satisfied because it never can be by mere human beings, in my case, specifically men. The solution to the main character’s longing and desperation is to hire an actor to impersonate this romantic archetype: “Life Could Be a Dream….”
The deception, if it is one, is unveiled to the horror of the family, but I found the perception quite astonishing: the early formation of girls’ imagination through romantic pop music, with an endless past and apparently an endless future.
So the Somewhere Out There You is a love song to the impossible dream of romantic fulfillment.
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