Shay it again, Duffin

When’s the last time you got a free stein of Budweiser plopped on the table at an after-dinner theater? That’s the sweet shtick with which Dublin-born-and-beered Shay Duffin opens his world-premiere, one-person, two-hour meander through the Chicago newspaper philosophizing of turn-of-the-century pundit Finley Peter Dunne.
According to Mr. Dooley at Barnard Sackett’s On Stage Theatre (2020 Sansom Street) is a steal of an evening’s entertainment even if you’re not at the front-room tables which get the free Buds.

The 50-year-old Duffin is well-known throughout the country for his almost 3,000 performances of his Confessions of an Irish Rebel, a one-person stagger through the short and intermittently happy life of his Dublin buddy, Brendan Behan.

It was during one Behan blast of his in Chicago several years ago that a retired educator asked him backstage if he had ever heard of Dunne, the newspaper humorist. “Never,” Duffin had to reply, gladly accepting an anthology of Mr. Dooley’s fictional philosophizings, delivered from behind a mythical South Chicago bar.

Duffin soon went on a Dooley roll, haunting used book stores across the country as he Behanized, amassing 277 sententious utterances of the amiable barkeep. He winnowed these down to 40 topics, as timely as the latest traffic report on KYW, some 14 of which he pastiches together as he searches for optimum audience impact.

Since the world premiere, February 9, for example, he has added songs to the taped player-piano simulation that honkytonks the segues between Dooley’s extemporaneous asides to Hennessey, the barkeep’s indefatigable (and entirely tacit!) straight man.

I’ve been a Dooley nut for a quarter of a century, ever since the best student I ever had at Penn, a 21-year-old Stakhovanite named Stephen Harmelin (he’s now a partner in Dilworth, Paxson etc.) dumped a 75-page monster term paper on the humorist in the introductory American Civilization course.

No matter that the paper was so good it anticlimacted the remaining 20 years of my teaching. (“It’s good,” I’d ruminate later over outstanding papers, “but it’s not nearly as good as Harmelin’s.”) Thus did he and Mr. Dooley make a widely despised hard grader out of me.

So I thought it would only be poetic justice to have him accompany me in case the play was lousy. After all, how can a native Hibernian like Duffin get at the heart of a Chicago Mick’s shtick? Duffin was so diffident about this issue that he commissioned eight different Americans, in a vain search for a viable mosaic. Finally, he demurred to the wisdom of his “sainted mother”: “If you want something done right, do it yourself.” So he did.

Well, Mrs. Duffin surely did it right when she conceived this multi-talented Mick. He sings, he plays many parts, he sweeps the stage floor—like a pigs-in-the-pantry Irishman. His casual shuffling off of the duet he has very meticulously swept up off the barroom floor in the opening scene gets the first laugh.

Harmelin is no fool. He knows how punitive old professors can be under the guise of favors. So he brought along his dazzling blonde Lithuanian of a wife, Terry—as boredom insurance. He, she committed the first guffaw. And immediately started to quaff off her free Bud. Harmelin has good taste in tarts as well as term papers.

I’m not going to try to simulate the timing and skill of Duffin from behind the proscenium arch of this Czech portable. He’s too mercurial, too full of sly winks and other mannerisms, too theatrical in short. Dooley has to be seen to be lip-smacking savored. But you’ll be amazed at how undated his bits are on jogging and weight losing, the perils of being nominated vice president, the high cost of medicine.

Let me just lay a Dooleyism on you: “I don’t think we injoy other people’s sufferin’, Hennessy. It isn’t acshally injoyment. But we fell better f’r it.” And how. And so will you feel better for not having to slash your way through the orthographical jungle which tingled Dunne’s newly literate immigrant readers (Look, Ma, I recognize misspellings).

Duffin told me he considers this performance an annuity for his old age. He’s going to retired rich, famous and the Hal Holbrook of Finley Peter Dunne. Nice going, Shay.

From Welcomat: After Dark, Hazard-at-Large