FALLING UPWARD
The first few scenes of Falling Upward treat the audience to Bradbury’s lame conception of the Irish sense of humor. These scenes contain local color, shenanigans, and the sort of wordplay that would make James Joyce glad he’s dead. Hold on to your hats for the “comic” reenactment of a bicycle (pronounced buy-cycle, not basic-ul) accident. But the real corker is an elaborate, and gratuitous, interlude about the late Lord Killgotten’s will, which stipulates that the contents of his first-rate wine cellar be poured into his grave. Of course, the boys from Finn’s Pub deem this a sacrilege and propose an organic method of first recycling the wine right there in the cemetery, promising that it will eventually wind up in the grave. Now, if you don’t see the conclusion to this gag coming from way over the horizon, face it, your sense of humor is brain dead. And oh, those witty Irish–anything for a drink.
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If you were to substitute blacks for gays in this play, and compare them to the Irish based on their great love of singing, dancing, and getting intoxicated, you’d have a riot in the theater. And somehow I don’t think the Irish people need Bradbury’s admiration for their being liberal enough to admit that gays just might be human. Because Bradbury admires only the crudest of stereotypes in Falling Upward: Irish as alcoholics, gays as bourgeois daisy-sniffers. The amazing and ultimately insulting thing about it all is Bradbury’s unwitting sincerity.
