Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [49]
The insights of the play left a mark on Redford. In his diary he jotted down a few of Hickey’s searing lines: “The history of the world proves that truth has no bearing on anything” and “Men don’t want to be saved from themselves because then they’d have to give up greed … and they don’t want to pay that price for liberty.” Redford underlined the last speech. “It summarized what I felt about American life as I knew it growing up. We were all looking for the good life, but we didn’t want to probe too deeply. It was a life of illusions and noncommunication, and that had always felt wrong. O’Neill was about reaching for understanding, and working that text made me comfortable for the first time about this life I’d found myself in. I wasn’t yet an actor, but I was in a state of becoming.”
Before Iceman aired, Hesseltine finally found Redford work in theater again, in another Hibernian drama, James Costigan’s stage version of his Emmy-winning television play, Little Moon of Alban. Harryetta Peterka, a friend from AADA, remembered Herman Shumlin, the director of Little Moon, who had also directed Redford’s walk-on in Tall Story, voicing uncertainty about his own decision to cast Redford. “He’d seen Bob in an episode of The Deputy and was unimpressed. He said, ‘Frances Fuller keeps saying he’s shaping up like Spencer Tracy. I can’t see it. He’s too glib.’ But then he liked the Playhouse 90 and Hesseltine convinced him to take a chance with him in the Costigan play.”
Redford had seen the NBC version of Little Moon of Alban and loved Costigan’s dark musicality. It reminded him of all Lena’s old Fenian stories. The play is set in Ireland at the time of the 1916 rebellion and revolves around the conflict of an Irish nurse from a Republican family, Brigid Mary, forced to tend to a British army lieutenant, Kenneth Boyd, who is responsible for the death of her lover, the IRA gunman Dennis Walsh. Brigid Mary, despite herself, falls for Boyd as she urges him to fight for life in the face of death. Redford would have preferred the Boyd role but happily took on Walsh. “Walsh’s last big speech, just before he’s killed, is spectacular,” says Redford. “He walks onto a Liffey bridge and recites a lament about Irish martyrdom. I knew I could knock that down so well. I only had to tune back in to Lena.”
Experienced actors—John Justin as Boyd and Julie Harris as Brigid Mary—surrounded Redford. But Shumlin’s direction, Redford now feels, weakened the production. “He was no Sidney Lumet, though he did try to expand the historical content of the play, which was a plus. But he was from the old school, like Jehlinger, bossy, rigid and backward-looking, and he succumbed to the temptation to simply re-create what had been done before in the television version.
“It absolutely killed me to see what Shumlin allowed Justin and Julie to do with those sensitive scenes Costigan wrote. Brigid Mary resolves her problem by deciding to become a nun. I remember sitting at the read-throughs watching this beautiful finale Costigan had written where Boyd accepts his personal concession to faith and walks away, kissing Brigid Mary one last time with the words, ‘I shan’t say goodbye, it seems mundane. I shall simply say this: that I kiss your mouth, most humbly and gratefully.’ I would have sold my soul to deliver those lines. But they played them sentimentally and threw it away.”
Among those filling the IRA roles in the play were the Clancy brothers, on the brink of an international career as a folk group. “Redford was one of the lads,” said Liam Clancy, “and as comfortable in his Irishness as I am in mine. But there was a problem. We drank together, and he told me all his concerns about the play, and all he wished it to be. He had all the focus of a serious stage actor, but I sensed he was being pulled away. Most of the young actors