Tales From Rainwater Pond is written and performed by Billy Roche, a playwright and novelist whose work often centers on his hometown of Wexford, a coastal community of just under 20,000. Actually, what is presented at 1st Irish is Mr. Roche performing two short stories, “Maggie Angre” and “Haberdashery” from a book of short stories by the same name. And what stories they are.
Mr. Roche has the rare gift of richness of detail without superfluity of emotion. His brief hints at the grief of a father or the burden of a long-burning love are stunning because we are given merely a suggestion and the foundation to fill in the rest. While the stories are uniquely small-town Irish, the humor and loss they describe are universally human. There is something that happens during this show that is quite larger than its individual pieces.
Although an actor of some experience, Mr. Roche has the slow delivery and wry amusement of a writer reading his own work. At the beginning of the piece, there seems to be a firm fourth wall despite the direct address, although that breaks down by the end of the show. While Mr. Roche occasionally enacts an action in the first story and portrays the narrator of the second story, there seems to be no reason why this should be a play as well as a book. However, Mr. Roche and the production possess some ineffable magic of storytelling that makes the stories breathe in a way no reading could. The simple act of one man telling an intricate story of lonely people he cared about became a community meditation.
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