Hear Me Looking at You

Culhane's Hear Me Looking at You emerges from this focus on performance, research and storytelling. The performance's first act allows Culhane to recount stories of her unconventional childhood as the product of a tumultuous marriage between her Jewish, activist mother and her Irish father, Gerry, a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. It follows the Culhane family as they move from Canada to California, but spends most of the time dealing with the aftermath and conflicts involved when Gerry drags his family to Ireland. Gerry, Culhane makes clear, has a deep and problematic connection to Ireland. Her grandmother, Gerry's mother, was a Catholic, Irish nationalist belonging to a family fiercely devoted to the creation of an independent Irish republic. Their house was a hub for like-minded citizens before the Easter Rising of 1916 put an end to such a political possibility. At some point, Culhane's grandmother became the subject of a public scandal (she had a relationship with a Protestant) that resulted in her leaving Ireland and living "in exile" in Montreal. Into this environment, Gerry is born and he inherits his mother's Irish republican zeal. It is his dream to return, with family-Culhane, her mother and her sister-in tow to his motherland, and he moves them there in the early 1950s. The problem, however, is that Gerry's idea of Ireland and its social realities do not match. Culhane adeptly demonstrates this contradiction: she adopts her father's voice and relates the stories and notions Gerry had told her family about the Emerald Isle; she juxtaposes this with her own memories of her family's struggles to settle and to make ends meet once there. Her mother has to return to Canada for lengthy periods to make enough money for the family to survive. With no set place to live, [Dara Culhane] and her sister are sent to boarding schools. Gerry's sense of an Irish home remains but an imaginary figuration. As time goes by, the differences between the Ireland experienced and felt by Culhane's increasingly dispersed family and the Ireland coiyured up in the dreams and stories of her father become irreconcilable. With the burden of income increasingly falling on Culhane's mother, her parents' marriage comes to seem like a troubling mismatch between drastically different personalities and ideals. Culhane's parents divorce in 1960, and Culhane, at age ten, returns to Montreal with her mother, leaving her father behind in Ireland. The narrative of Hear Me Lo