Scenery of Belfast

Owen McCafferty grew up in Belfast. So his play “Scenes From the Big Picture,” which covers 24 hours in the lives of 21 Belfast characters, must be bloody and political, right?

Wrong. The sectarian strife of Northern Ireland lurks in the background, but no one talks about it. “I never mention whether anyone in the play is in a political debate,” McCafferty told an audience after an opening weekend performance of the play’s U.S. premiere, by the Furious Theatre Company at the Pasadena Playhouse Balcony Theatre. “The emotional baggage we carry is a lot stronger.”

Two of McCafferty’s inspirations were American plays he’s read but never seen: Elmer Rice’s “Street Scene,” about adultery in a New York tenement, and Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” about life and death in a small New Hampshire town.

Life, death and adultery are elements of “Scenes From the Big Picture” as well. “I started with the notion of telling as many stories as I could,” he said -- in search of some “big picture.”

This strategy brought unintended results.

Remarkable critical praise for the play’s April 2003 premiere, at the prestigious National Theatre in London, did not draw the offers for subsequent productions that might have been expected.

It seems “Big Picture” is too big. Its cast of 21, McCafferty has concluded, made the play prohibitively expensive. Only musicals, with their supposedly greater revenue potential, are regularly allowed casts of that size. And McCafferty didn’t want a production to use actors in multiple roles for fear that the play’s sense of a larger community might suffer.

So “Scenes From the Big Picture” is only now in its second production -- at an 84-seat theater in Pasadena where each actor is paid $15 per performance. The entire budget for the show, which follows McCafferty’s wish for no doubling of actors, is about $12,000.

The Furious production is taking place just up the stairs from the larger Pasadena Playhouse, but the playhouse company couldn’t possibly afford “Scenes,” says playhouse executive director Lyla White. Under the playhouse’s union contract, each actor would have to receive at least $10,000 in wages and benefits for a standard-length run (including rehearsals) -- not to mention a production’s other costs.

“Scenes” was under consideration at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre for about six months. But Steppenwolf passed not only because of the cast size, said Ed Sobel, the company’s director of new play development, but also because of concerns about an American audience’s ability to understand the dialect.

The Furious production attempts to resolve that concern by including a glossary of the play’s Belfast terms in the program. But in the post-performance discussion with the playwright, one theatergoer asked if it would have been OK if the production had adapted the dialogue into American slang -- and presumably had used American accents.

McCafferty said yes, that would have been OK. Some of the actors, who had trained with tapes of Belfast speech patterns for weeks, reacted with dismayed groans.

In an interview the next day, McCafferty modified his answer slightly. “The accent lends a certain authenticity,” he said, “a certain beat to the language which is uniquely Belfast.” However, he noted that the play will have to do without that beat in its next scheduled production, in Macedonia in December, when it will be staged in Macedonian.

The audience reaction is what counts, McCafferty said. “It doesn’t matter what I think of the accents. It seems to me the audience took to it.”

Director Damaso Rodriguez said the playwright, who sat in on a week of rehearsals, “encouraged us to play the dark stuff as dark as we could.”

McCafferty, “like anybody my age that has grown up in Belfast,” has known people who were killed -- “at one time bombs were an everyday event.” He was raised Catholic in a mixed Catholic and Protestant neighborhood, but he has been an atheist for 25 years.

He held a variety of jobs in his young adult years. He worked in an office that issued birth and death certificates and marriage licenses -- “hatches, matches and dispatches, we called them.” He was a tiler, managed a commodities trader’s office and studied philosophy at the University of Ulster.

Many of the scenes from “Big Picture” focus on employees of a slaughterhouse. McCafferty worked at such a place for six months, carrying hunks of meat.

Twelve years ago, when he was 31, he was “writing useless short stories full of dialogue” when his wife, Peggy, suggested he should write a play. Immediately, “I felt I knew what I was doing. That doesn’t mean I got it right all the time, but I didn’t worry about making certain choices.”

He got enough right that his plays were produced in Belfast and later in England, including his “Closing Time” at the National. Last year, the acclaim for his work was so considerable that the Irish Times dubbed him “the toast of London’s theatre world.”

But another ironic result of the size of “Scenes” emerged after it opened. “I used up a lot of stories,” McCafferty said. “When I worked on another original play it felt difficult.” In the meantime, he wrote an adaptation of “Days of Wine and Roses” for Sam Mendes’ company. Now he is halfway through a first draft of another original play.

He didn’t make the rounds of Hollywood on his recent trip to L.A. -- his first visit to the U.S. in 25 years -- though he is open to the idea of turning the panoramic “Scenes” into a screenplay. “Too many writers think it’s easy to write movies after only one stage play,” he said. “Nine times out of 10, they write bad screenplays.”

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‘Scenes From the Big Picture’

Where: Pasadena Playhouse Balcony Theatre, 39 S. El Molino Ave., Pasadena

When: 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, 7:30 p.m. Sundays

Ends: Nov. 21

Price: $15 and $24

Contact: (626) 356-7529