The logistics, physical, and emotional demands of the production are mind-boggling – one actor spending 80 minutes morphing among 12 characters with unique accents and mannerisms while delivering lines almost non-stop and, amazingly enough, in rhyme.
While it might sound overwhelming at best or gimmicky at worst, the reality of The Smuggler, opening the 2026-27 season at The Gamm Theatre, is as delightful as the main character’s Irish brogue. Plus, the good news for audiences is the challenge of playing Tim Finnegan is assumed by the extraordinarily talented Tony Estrella, Gamm’s artistic director.
The story, written and directed by Ronán Noone, is a twisting slip of a thriller that, like the main character, seems to have everyone fooled at first. Finnegan is a hapless Irish immigrant – with his green card, he’ll tell you – who fancies himself a writer but is more apt to hand out his creative tales over the bar with beer and whiskey than write them down on paper. When he loses his bartending job, he gets more creative at finding an income so his wife can have the house she wants and he can deflect her father’s barbs that he’s a bum.
Set on an island Noone says is loosely based on Martha’s Vineyard, the story layers in class struggles, racism and other difficult topics as easily as Finnegan fills a shot glass. The timeliness of its messages is blatant – the show opens with the line “I am an American” and Noone peppers it with observations about the vital nature of immigrants to the day-to-day drudgeries of American life.
The show also examines what Finnegan calls “moral relativity,” as he discovers, “There’s a thin line between desperation and acting immorally.” His enterprising spirit either makes him exactly what people fear about immigrants, or a hero who takes care of his own family in his new country.
Noone’s words – and the rhyming, which is subtle and clever versus Seussian – are insightful, especially for audiences watching nightly news accounts of immigrant mistreatment across the country. It takes on the bias from both sides, and even between immigrants from different parts of the world. It examines the promise of streets paved with gold from the viewpoint of the underpaid immigrant tasked with paving them.
Causing the words to burst with emotion and impact, however, is all Estrella, who holds character without flaw and conjures up the raw emotions – anger, greed, disappointment, shame – of each with ease.
The Smuggler, at Gamm, 1245 Jefferson Blvd., Warwick, through Oct 11, is a sad dissection of the universal American immigrant experience, making it essential theatre for today’s citizens. Find tickets at gammtheatre.org.