GLOUCESTER - "Ordinary things have lovely wings" is a line of
poetry storyteller Jay O'Callahan borrows to explain the relative
ease and difficulty of creating the two major tales of "Points
of View" at Gloucester Stage Company. The events of his Brookline
childhood story "Glasses" are ordinary, while the wartime exploits
of "Father Joe" are extraordinary; with both, O'Callahan not only
takes wing but soars.
"Glasses" is part of a series about growing up in Pill Hill
(named for all the doctors there, he explains) near the end of
World War II. His mother kneads in the red dot on top of the white
margarine so it will look less ersatz; real butter will signify
the war's end. He busies himself climbing trees and accidentally
breaking things - sometimes simultaneously - while looking forward
to the return of his uncle Jackie from the fighting. O'Callahan
recalls "the rhythm of his neighborhood," where he's whistled
home for supper as women call for their pooches, and captures
its tone and tempo perfectly.
In his school of "toughies," getting glasses is the worst thing
that can happen to a boy, but happen it does. (O'Callahan compares
enduring the optometrist's grilling of "Better, same or worse"
with going to confession.) He then proceeds to break the glasses
- at $12 a pop - in a series of humorous (to us) accidents. "At
least he's dependable," his father groans. "He breaks them once
a month."
Uncle Jackie returns, but one war still goes on: O'Callahan's
gentle Aunt Ann, on another side of the family, has been unable
to leave the house since a fruit merchant spat at her. She's Canadian
Japanese, and even Uncle Jackie, his war wounds still fresh, lashes
out at her at O'Callahan's birthday party. The young boy feels
responsible, and throws his uncle's present - a baseball autographed
by Dom DiMaggio and Ted Williams - at his departing car. (He looked
for it later, he tells us, but the ball was lost.)
O'Callahan's grandmother comes to live with them, feigning independence
but showing up for special dinners; "Mama would suck all of the
air in the house in," O'Callahan remembers. Grandma provides both
an espionage target for his private game of Master Spy and a source
of glasses to swipe when he breaks his once more on the day of
Uncle Jackie's wedding. Yet she forgives him. ("With all his faults,
I love him still, "she repeats to his embarrassment), just as
Aunt Ann will have an opportunity to forgive Uncle Jackie.
In "Glasses," O'Callahan plays many delightfully detailed characters,
but they are all viewed from the lens of his younger self. In
"Tulips," a charming short story for children, he's a straight
forward narrator telling of naughty Pierre and his "Grandma mere."
With "Father Joe," O'Callahan attempts a more sophisticated perspective,
blending "Rashomon"-like fragments of a stirring (and true) war
story with a second-person overlay. "You are the captain...you
are the bomb...you are the (USS) Franklin," he tells the audience
at different stages as he shifts the point of view of the horrifying
aftermath of a Japanese attack on a US aircraft carrier.
O'Callahan's uncle, a Navy chaplain, won a Medal of Honor for
his role in saving the ship and hundreds of men from further destruction.
But his tale of bravery is not only splintered in focus, it's
interspersed with flash-forwards into O'Callahan's college days
at Holy Cross in Worcester, where his uncle taught despite the
ill effects of a severe stroke after the war. These vignettes
of scholastic and romantic adventures offer more of O'Callahan's
easy, self-deprecating humor, while establishing his uncle as
a man of many gifts beyond courage. With unselfconscious animation,
O'Callahan disputes his uncle's fear that he, like the battered
aircraft carrier, was ever "dead in the water."
Being alive to humanity, its burdens and joys, is apparently
a family tradition.
April 25, 1995
Reprinted from the Boston Globe, by permission.
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