Pgh Lesbian Correspondents

I left the production of ‘The Smuggler’ on Friday evening feeling uneasy and disconcerted. It took me awhile to sit with those feelings.

We are not them and they are not us.

‘The Smuggler’ is a production of Pittsburgh International Classic Theater at Carnegie Stage running through Sunday, March 22, 2026.

The play takes us to a small elite island near Massachusetts. Follow Timothy along a journey from unemployment with a wife and toddler to support through menial labor and onward until he becomes a criminal with a conscience. As he early made plain, Tim is a naturalized American immigrant from Ireland. There’s very little backstory. He’s Irish, married to an American woman, father to a toddler, a wanna-be writer, and a bartender. And poor. That’s all we get.

There’s something unique and somewhat of a fetish in American culture about Irish immigrants. I’m sure you heard the stories of bigotry and prejudice, fueled by a distinction between an Irish poverty/working class and other white European colonizers. It has given rise to destructive tropes comparing indentured servitude to chattel slavery. It gives us a classic example of how the construct of the white race was adaptable enough to welcome in the Irish when their bodies were needed to maintain dominance in an increasingly diverse American culture.

In my own family research, I found a shocking revelation that the more affluent Irish immigrants (often from Northern Ireland) arrived a generation earlier, bought property, built churches, and invested in the business world. In my case, the more distant immigrants ran slum housing in Pittsburgh where they charged their fellow countyfolx rent to live as poorly as they had under English rule. Never fear, that newer generation immediately identified as nativists and kicked rocks at other newer arrivals.

So I was curious to see how an Irish man would dive into immigration issues in 21st century America.

Timothy is charming. Some of the story is odd, like a family living in a shanty with no plumbing because he doesn’t have a job. Perhaps if they lived in the basement of his in-laws home it would have felt more relatable. People do live in these conditions, but it felt jarring here – I just can’t see the grandparents letting that happen. Or his wife.

Timothy wants to take care of his family, but his writing is not selling and the bar where he works closes down. So he takes a manual labor job with a construction crew where he reflects on the intersecting construction skills of the various cultures in this workplace.

Sensing their vulnerabilities, he decides to rob them so he can buy a house. And he does indeed rob them and but a house. You don’t typically by a house with a $20k cash deposit and no source of income. Stolen money is usually laundered. So this was also jarring.

His crime spree leads him into the ‘underbelly’ as they say of local human trafficking, drawing us into the morality of a poor white man stealing from even poorer people of color and much more significant vulnerabilities. There’s a shady contractor who employs them and a shady ‘smuggler’ who brings them to the island to work off their debt. Both are men of color with accents that don’t quite clarify their identities. They are just bad guys who exploit fellow immigrants.

The reality of immigrants trafficking other immigrants isn’t shocking. This is where the narrative really stumbled – all of the bad guys were immigrants themselves. White Americans were complicit here and there, but that was tamped down a bit.

It is disconcerting to listen/watch a white cisgender man ‘do’ the accents of Afro-Indigenous people, both male and female. This was especially true when his big reveal about the young Afro-Carribean woman is exposed. I did not like a white man putting the words of a Black woman into the mouth of another white man. That still feels wrong.

The jokes landed with the audience, but their laughter felt uncomfortable. Did they really understand the ultimate ‘joke’ – that we white audience members are benefiting from the pain and hardship of immigrant neighbors, as entertainment, employees, and a growing underclass? It reminds me of how quickly our collective attention moved from Chicago to Portland to Charlotte and then Minneapolis. Where is it now?

I often suspect these plays challenging our sensibilities are colluding to reveal something disconcerting about white American liberals, but we think it is targeting Republicans.

Tim’s meandering narrative was hard to follow, almost more interested in the rhyming scheme than the play’s theme (see what I did there?)

Tim loses his job, his son is hospitalized, he’s beaten, his in-laws betray him, he hates his own job, he lives in a house without a toilet, and he’s attacked by a super-human rat while trying to steal again. I’m trying to follow the story, but when he left the hospital AMA after telling us his leg was broken in a brace and other very serious injuries – I gave up. What?

I do not find most plays worthless even I’m confused or befuddled. My friend and I had an interesting conversation about these topics, I know that PICT is helmed by a woman descended from immigrants of color. But I can’t help but feel that this play is no longer useful or appropriate. The playwright and the actor, both white cisgender men, had no business engaging with the accents and cultures of people of color, especially Afro-descendant women. If they had told the story without the accents, maybe?

I wasn’t invested in Tim or his shenanigans. His moral collapse into human trafficking isn’t interesting. His partnerships with unsavory types also similarly engaged is just glanced over. He ends up being one-upped by a Black woman and that was a little satisfying.

TIm isn’t the hero, protagonist, or lead character. He’s the barkeep sharing a story that perhaps he made up in his imagination. He’s not loyal, smart, or a good parent/husband.

There’s not much moral ambiguity in Tim’s story as he likes us to think. He had a job as a laborer painting houses. His wife had a job. They had family nearby. They had options even if they went unexplored by the script. He also had his Irish identity. He was an immigrant, true. But a white immigrant from a Christian nation who spoke English. That’s not really in the same strata as any other immigrant in the tale.

I’m no playwright, but what I wanted to experience was a deep dive into the Irish experience on its own footing. There’s so much to explore, especially our American obsession with all things Irish (except history.) It is okay to acknowledge that the contemporary experiences of Irish immigrants aren’t roses and sunshine, that bias still exists, the multigenerational trauma is a real thing for people who have been brutalized by their oppressors, and the opportunity even for white men isn’t to be found on a street paved with gold.

As he made the mocktails, I was reminded of the social media video trend of applying makeup or some other routine behavior while talking about an important issue. I guess storytelling is storytelling. Unlike other theaters, PICT made the recipes readily available. The mocktails are distributed to the reserved seating section of the play. I kept wondering ‘is he rinsing the jigger?’ and that was a little distracting.

I’ll once again say – all theaters who serve thematic cocktails/mocktails should send the recipes AND a playlist link to anyone who purchased a ticket. It takes a few minutes, but feels like a nice add-on.

‘The Smuggler’ feels like it should be a good show and dives close to important themes that progressive white folx should consider. Perhaps if they spent more time giving voice to their own experiences as white Irish men and less speaking for other immigrants, I wouldn’t be struggling so hard to tie this all up.

It is important to support community theater like PICT so I encourage you to go and find your own way through this story.

Ask yourself the important questions and listen to the voices of immigrants. Directly, not thru the filters of white men, even white male immigrants.