Mojo Mickybo

MIME DOESN’T PAY Waller and Kauzlaric, from left, get their tickets to the finger-gun show.

Photo: Jackie Jasperson

A Stand by Me with rubber bullets, Belfast playwright McCafferty’s 1998 work chronicles a brief childhood friendship in early-’70s Northern Ireland. Mojo Mickybo covers familiar territory, albeit vivified with sharp, carefully observed detail. The titular pair are bullied by their opposite numbers, Fuckface and his minion Gank the Wank. Family problems—Mojo’s da is a compulsive philanderer, Mickybo’s a dreamy drunk—overshadow their film-addled reveries, involving reenactments of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. And while it’s a motif that McCafferty handles lightly, the traces of civil unrest are pervasive, from sightings of British soldiers to the events that finally, irrevocably alter the main characters’ relationship.

The play’s central conceit has Kauzlaric and Waller playing not only Mojo and Mickybo, respectively, but the entire array of Belfast inhabitants they encounter, 17 in all. They handle the challenge well, shifting crisply from kids to bullies to anxious mothers and irresponsible fathers, all along sporting impressively convincing accents. The piece suffers from overly ponderous and unnecessary narration, which Kauzlaric solemnly delivers; happily, it decreases as the play continues. While Seanachaí’s bare-bones black-box staging at first underscores the actorly tour de force, over the course of the hour the imaginative landscape of Belfast emerges: the bus drivers and ice-cream sellers, the women on street corners, the whole fabric of shared dreams and disappointments, painstakingly woven and too easily torn.

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