A Rooster for the Phoenix

Playwright Sean O'Casey was an ag ing angry young man in the '20s when he wrote Juno and the Paycock and The Plough and the Stars. He was an angry old man of 69 when he wrote Coclc-A-Doodle Cock-A-Doodle the play he called his favorite. Audiences and producers have not generally agreed with his assessment; the play has rarely been staged during the 20 years since it was written, and its runs have been short.

Perhaps it was ahead of its time -- as indicated by the rollicking, rumbustious piece of theater that the APA-Phoenix Repertory Company made of it on Broadway last week.

Today's playgoers are not so likely to be put off by Cock-A-Doodle Dan dy's zany unconcern with sequiturs, probabilities or dramatic ps and qs.

O'Casey was offended by realistic the ater ("To hell with so-called realism, for it leads nowhere," he wrote) and in this blast at what he felt was wrong with Ireland, he let his antic imagination range and flow.

The first character onstage is a bird --The Cock, magnificently plumed and wattled by Costume Designer Nancy Potts, and played by Barry Bostwick with impudent elegance. The Cock, said O'Casey, represents "the joyful, active spirit of life as it weaves a way through the Irish scene," and it spreads terror among the crabbed codgers and priest-ridden puritans of the countryside. They quail from its presence and blast at it with guns. Still, The Cock bewitches a high silk hat and a bottle of John Jameson, and rips to shreds the vestments of a priest who tries to exorcise it with bell, book and candle.

Pet Hate. However, the women of the play--a farmer's wife, his daughter and his maid--are delighted with this "saucy bird." O'Casey saw the repressed and persecuted Irish female as the repository of all that was open and joyous and life-loving in his native land. The conflict between them and the naysaying, money-hungry men is the essential drama of Cock-A-Doodle Dandy --with Protestant O'Casey's pet hate, the Roman Catholic Church, as archvillain. In the end, the women are roughed up and driven away to find "a place where life resembles life more than it does here," and the play ends in a mood of sadness for the desolation of spirit that has fallen on the land. Yet for all his bitterness, O'Casey keeps his broad Irish sodbusters quirkily alive. Like his symbolic rooster, he weaves his own warm, life-affirming way through the play with a magic mix of phrases and cadences.

The APA company mercifully makes little effort to brogue O'Casey's lines, with the result that they are much more understandable and astonishing than they would be in an imitation Abbey accent. And in a script where almost every role is a juicy character part, the players have sensibly resisted the temptation to make too much of a good thing. Sydney Walker's superstitious, avaricious old bog farmer is especially well drawn, and Frances Sternhagen manages to be at the same time gay, defiant and pathetic as Loreleen, the physical embodiment of the wild-spinning rooster spirit that is terrorizing the men. The most uninhibitedly theatrical performance, though, is delivered by a thatched cottage, which shakes, rattles, writhes, smokes, flashes, and sheds its vines in one of the most dramatic cases of demonic possession since the Gadarene swine.

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