'That Was Then' by Seanachai: There's a real Anglo-Irish story at the center of this thing
THEATER REVIEW: "That Was Then" ★★½ Through April 3 by Seanachai Theatre Company at the Irish American Heritage Center, 4626 N. Knox Ave.; Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes; Tickets: $22-$26 at 866-811-4111 or www.seanachai.org
“That Was Then,” the new Irish play by Gerard Stembridge that's currently up at Seanachai Theatre Company, is a bit of a weird cross between the nationalist probings of, say, the great Irish writer Brendan Behan and the domestic English comedies of the also-great Alan Ayckbourn.
But it's tough to do both at once.
The topic of this play — produced a few years ago at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and now in a Midwestern premiere at Chicago's Irish American Heritage Center — is the perennially tricky relationship between the Irish and the Brits, with a desire to probe and define the character of both in terms of the many hundreds of years of their antagonistic history. But the method is that old Ayckbourn trope of two scenes taking place at the same time, using the same actors who must keep switching back and forth, even as the dinner table in the middle of the stage hosts two different meals in two different times in two different cities.