By SHARON EBERSON
Gone in a bar fire but not forgotten, now, finally, ready for its coming out party, The Smuggler – a one-man thriller in rhythmic verse – is ready for its closeup.
Pittsburgh International Classic Theatre first announced Michael Patrick Trimm in the role of bartender/smuggler/immigrant Tim Finnegan for March of last year, working with director Patrick Cannon and expected at Riley’s Pour House in Carnegie. Fate and fire intervened, and Riley’s burned to the ground in November 2024, with Trimm moving on to a two-hander, the excellent co-production King James, at both City Theatre and Cleveland Play House.
Starting March 13, 2026, Trimm is now ready to get fully under the skin of Finnegan, with a new director (Melissa Grande) and a new venue (Carnegie Stage), after more than a year of stop-and-start preparation.
“Wow, yeah, it’s been a ride since Patrick, [PICT Artistic Director Eliza Huffman], and I first conceived of this,” Trimm said of presenting the Ronán Noone work. “No one had the original venue for the play burning down on their bingo card. But, honestly, I believe art meets the moment, and as much as it feels like this play is a long time coming, I now can’t imagine having done it at a better time than this March of 2026.
“In a lot of ways, the amount of time that I got to sit with and percolate on Tim and his perspectives on being an immigrant and the American Dream, not to mention the world grappling so much with questions about class struggle and immigration right now, and what makes someone “An American.” … I think it just has made the telling of this story all the richer. I mean, hopefully. Y’all will be the judge.”
The challenges aren’t just the pours. Trimm has been demonstrating his/Tim’s mixology skills on social media. But a solo show in rhymed verse would seem to be a Shakespearean task.
— Michael Patrick Trimm
“Oh boy, yeah, it’s a marathon — 75ish relentless minutes of acting and storytelling and playing about 10+ different characters will work up the ol’ appetite,” Trimm said via email. “It’s such a privilege of a challenge to undertake. But I think the beauty of Ronan’s play is that the rhyming element actually helps you rather than adds to the difficulty. It’s such a gift.”
He added, “Tim, at his core, is a storyteller who relishes the opportunity to tell his story to others and, hopefully, convince them that he is a hero, not a villain. And the rhyme is so wonderfully helpful in finding that relishing of the story and the way that he tries win over the audience, that it’s made the work a delight, and so much more than a mountain to climb.”
Trimm conceived of the presentation with Cannon, the Artistic Director of Little Lake Theatre Company who is “an incredible entrepreneurial innovator in theater-making, and, quite frankly, one of my favorite people in Pittsburgh’s theater community, so I probably would never have undertaken this without him initially,” Trimm said.
However, Cannon’s busy Little Lake schedule meant that the change to working with Grande happened “relatively early.”
“It’s allowed for the artistic vision to really be Melissa’s and mine,” Trimm said.
Grande brings “a grasp and appreciation for Irish storytelling” to the production, “and the way she has grounded both of us in the stakes and themes of the play, outside of Tim.”
“In a one man show, sometimes you can really get caught nave-gazing because, heck, it’s just you in front of a bunch of onlookers, so the form and your own ego can really become all encompassing,” Trimm said. “But Melissa has kept us searching for more than just, ‘How do we thrill and entertain?’ This story poses some really inconvenient questions about the American Dream, and she’s made sure we tackle those head on.”
Finnegan gets caught up in some decidedly distasteful business in the recent past. It’s 2023, on the affluent island of Amity (think Jaws) in Massachusetts, and the United States is not living up to its promise.
“On one hand, I tend to become very protective of the characters I play,” Trimm said. “I always find myself feeling a sense of responsibility to my characters, because I am the only one who gets to give voice to their perspective. It ends up being a very vulnerable and precious relationship to me.
“On the other hand,” he continued, “I think the beauty of Tim and this story is that his choices are not truly for me to reconcile. Morally, his actions are for the audience to judge. Melissa and I have conceived of the telling of this story as Tim getting to plead his case to an unsuspecting jury of fellow Americans. Without giving too much away, Tim embraces the chance to convince others that, as he says, ‘What I did, good or bad, (is) a matter of subjectivity … That’s the definition of the American Dream’s narrative trajectory.’ ”
Trimm, a Gene Kelly Award nominee out of Hampton High School, has been making a case for his work out of New York (off-Broadway’s The Public Theater’s Julius Caesar); the younger Ed Guinan in The Alto Knights) and on Pittsburgh stages, including City Theatre, Pittsburgh Public Theater, barebones productions, and earlier incarnations of PICT.
The Smuggler hits close to home, going back to his family’s Irish roots.
“One of the reasons I have been so drawn to this story is how it marries concepts and themes that are so very of our country, with a foreign form in Irish storytelling that I have loved for a long time,” Trimm said.
“My late father, Tom Trimm, who was part Irish, was an incredible storyteller. He loved James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway and Robert Frost, and the way he would tell stories was so wonderful, and such a big part of my childhood. He would tell these stories with such theatricality, and mischief, and appreciation for the art form, that you would be captivated by him from start to finish, whether at the dinner table, or at parties, or at bedtime when I was a kid. And when I got older, I felt like he was in some way a continuation of that lineage of Irish storytelling. I’ve really tried to find him in Tim. This unabashed joy for the telling of the story itself, the showmanship. Hopefully, I do him proud, and do the form proud.”
TICKETS AND DETAILS
PICT’s production of The Smuggler is at Carnegie Stage, 25 W. Main Street, Carnegie, March 13-22, 2026. Opening night includes live music by Devilish Merry Trad Triad. Other special events include playwright Ronán Noone coming to Pittsburgh for a pre-show dinner and conversation on Saturday, March 14, (email carolynludwig@gmail.com for details) and a post-show talk-back on Sunday afternoon, March 15. Tickets: https://www.picttheatre.org/ .
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