A Great Rest for Maureen Stapleton

Lenox, MA - Memorial Mass and public reception for Maureen Stapleton in Lenox, May 5, 2006.

by Frances Benn Hall (about Ms. Hall)

"It isn't that I haven't prayed for you, Bartley, to the Almighty God. It isn't that I haven't said prayers in the dark night till you wouldn't know what I'd be saying; but it's a great rest I'll have now, and it's time surely."

The speaker is Maureen Stapleton, her Irish voice keening the poignant acceptance in the language from Irish playwright John Millington Synge's Riders to the Sea. In what may have been the final performance of a remarkable career, Ms. Stapleton recorded the lines for my neo-Noh play, The Children of Lir, which was presented at Berkshire Community College on March 23, 2003.

The Children of Lir is a Celtic legend in which four children are transformed into swans by an evil stepmother and doomed to 900 years of shivering on stormy Irish seas. All that remains of their former life is their gift of song.

The oral folk tale was written down by monks some time after St. Patrick had come to Ireland, and so the ending has the swans being baptized and changed into ancient human beings who can die and go instantly to heaven.

This is a commendable fate for the swans, but has always seemed to me one of convenience. I gave it a new ending in my neo-Noh staging of the play. Aengus, the Irish god of poetry and love, enters the plot. He cannot shape-change the swans back to children again, but he can time-change; he can evoke what could be if the swans were left swans to sing on the lakes and streams of Ireland to inspire coming generations, Irish poets from Yeats to Heaney to sing in an Ireland that, finally, is free.

The voices and words of the Irish great fill the stage, and the monk realizes that singing, too, is a way of praising God. When the swans are freed to fly away and sing over the rivers Liffey and Boyne, he admits that, in formation, they make a cross on the sky, a Celtic cross.

Since the voices were all taped, Ms. Stapleton, rather frail by the time, need not be present. We needed only her wonderful Irish voice reading from Riders to the Sea and from Lady Gregory's translation of a Celtic lament for an abandoned colleen. (The lament was included in John Huston's film of James Joyce's The Dead.)

The afternoon we went to her Lenox apartment to get her voice on tape, I warned my college-age assistant that Maureen Stapleton was a pro and doing us a favor; he could ask other readers to repeat a poem several times so he could choose and combine the best takes, but if on first reading, Maureen made no errors, it should be considered a "go." He tactfully agreed.

Arriving at Morgan Manor in Lenox, where she lived to be near her family, we were met not by the grand lady of American theatre, but by Maureen the retired grandmother, wearing a house dress and bedroom slippers. We set up in the living room and she read - beautifully.

When we finished, she remarked brightly, "And now, of course, you'll need me to read it again." There was no need really, but there was gratitude. She read it again, a pro until the end.

The tape sits proudly on my shelf, on it Maureen Stapleton's voice, clear and moving, "...It's a great rest I'll be having now, and it's time surely."

A Memorial Mass for Maureen Stapleton will be celebrated at St. Ann Church at 11 a.m. Friday, May 5 followed by a reception at the Lenox Library. All are welcome to come and share their memories of this remarkable woman, actress, and friend.