A Tale of Love Emerges From Ireland at War : Theater: Playwright Graham Reid goes back to his troubled homeland in 'Remembrance,' making its West Coast premiere Saturday at the Old Globe's Cassius Carter Centre Stage.

By NANCY CHURNIN

May 3, 1991 12 AM PT

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

SAN DIEGO — Sometimes a playwright’s native land is the most fertile soil from which to mine dramatic conflicts. For Athol Fugard, it’s South Africa. For Tennessee Williams, it was the American South. For Graham Reid, who is just beginning to be known in this country, it is Belfast, Ireland.

These writers find meaning in their particular circumstances that reverberates worldwide.

Reid writes about the violence between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, he writes about people he has known who have turned to terrorism, he writes about the innocent victims on both sides.

Reid’s “Remembrance,” opening Saturday at the Old Globe’s Cassius Carter Centre Stage, is a story about a 68-year-old Protestant widower and a 63-year-old Catholic widow who meet at their murdered sons’ graves and fall in love over the objections of their surviving children. The power of the play to extend beyond its particular setting has been proven. It had one of its most successful runs in Israel--not exactly a country known for its large Irish, Catholic or Protestant populations.

In 1986-87, “Remembrance” played 18 months in Tel Aviv--in Hebrew.

Reid said that while he “writes about what I know,” ultimately his plays are less about the specific political troubles in Belfast than they are “about relationships between people and how the external world affects people.”

“Remembrance” offers memories of a time when Northern Ireland wasn’t so war-torn. It is also a story of the split between young and old--the militancy of youth, and the greater sense of loss and disillusionment of the older people. It has been called a cross-generational version of the Romeo and Juliet story. The couple may be older, but they still are star-crossed lovers.

Andrew J. Traister who directs the West Coast premiere at the Old Globe, was not surprised that the show was popular in Israel: “It is about the Protestants and the Catholics,” Traister said. “There (in Israel) it’s the Palestinians and the Jews. This play is about families, what their children are going through and what their wives are going through. To me, this is a play about forgiveness. It says, ‘Yes, these things happen and we get dead bodies littered around us, but if you forgive, as best you can, life goes on and love can blossom in the midst of all this hate.’ ”

“Remembrance,” the most popular of Reid’s half-dozen plays to date, currently is beginning its eighth month Off Broadway at the Irish Arts Center, where it opened in October. Reid also is working on a screenplay for a movie version.

Speaking on the phone from London, where he has lived for the past five years, Reid said that although he was never personally involved in the violence in Northern Ireland, he knows people who were.

“What I find very hard is that I know people who have been the victims of violence and people who have been perpetrators of violence. I know one person I went to school with who did a brutal murder of a person in our own community under the guise of paramilitary activities, and it’s very hard to separate the person who did that murder with the person I played with.”

Reid, 45, a Protestant, didn’t grow up planning to become a writer. He left school at 15 because, as he said, “I hated it.” His goal was to become a manual laborer and he did that until back trouble intervened when he was in his 20s.

A psychiatric social worker who examined him told him that he wouldn’t be capable of holding down a manual job and that, in any case, he was “too intelligent” to be wasting his time on such work.

So he went back to school and in 1978 wrote his first play, “The Death of Humpty Dumpty,” a story about an innocent man who gets caught in the cross fire of violence in Belfast. The play was first produced in Ireland in 1979.

The play’s success led to a grant from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland that enabled him to resign from teaching in 1980 and write full-time. Since then, in addition to his half-dozen plays that have been produced, he has written 15 television plays as well as a new play, “Love,” his first to be set in a non-specific location--and not Belfast. Reid said he hopes for a London production of “Love,” although nothing is confirmed as yet.

Traister, who directed “The Death of Humpty Dumpty” at Los Angeles’s West Coast Ensemble in 1985, where it won five Dramalogue Awards, said on the phone from his San Diego hotel room that one of the elements in that play that impressed him most was Reid’s focus on the victims rather than the perpetrators of crimes.

“He never told us who fired the shots, whether it was the Catholics or the Protestants. The problem is the problem, and he doesn’t take a side.”

Reid says there are no sides. Violence, he said, is always wrong.

“I’ve always taken the view that if the violence would end, the community differences would heal. The fear and tension makes people irrational.” And, yet, Reid said he is able to write sympathetically about those who kill because “whilst I couldn’t condone the taking of a life, I might understand why.”

Reid said that most of all he likes to write about love, which he described with a laugh as “the last resort of the writer.”

“Remembrance” was inspired by seeing two old people sitting on a bench in a cemetery in North London, “as far away on either side of the bench as they could, but glancing surreptitiously at each other as if looking for an opportunity to speak.”

He refers to himself as “a great romantic,” and one of the sadnesses in the midst of his growing success is that he is going through a divorce from his wife, from whom he has been separated for many years.

The marriage, ironically, fell apart because of his move from working class to literary circles--”we couldn’t make that journey together and it’s something I will always regret,” he said.

Still, he remains devoted to his three children, his 20-year-old and 21-year-old daughters who live just outside Belfast and his son, 16, who lives in Belfast. He also confesses to having concerns about his son because he is young and the young usually are the ones recruited to fight for various causes.

Reid said he is grateful that he was 21 and married at the time the hostilities in Northern Ireland resumed with violent force in 1966, after years of relative calm.

“I hate to think what I might have been involved in had I been a teen-ager. I was terribly silly as a teen-ager, and I can understand that things happen when you’re young and you haven’t lived and you don’t have a sense of the total value of life.”

Speaking of his son, Reid’s worst fears are that his family might become like the families in his plays: “He hasn’t to my knowledge any inclinations (toward violence) and we live in a quiet middle-class area, but I worry about the dangers. I don’t want him to be a part of it. I would be very worried about him getting sucked into that.”