REVIEWS ...
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Players shine in GableStage production
Actors take on a probing work by celebrated Irish playwright Conor McPherson.
By Eileen Spiegler
In Conor McPherson's play Shining City, no one is sleeping. Every one of its four haunted souls has been put out of bed by choice or circumstance.
Ian, an ex-priest turned therapist, is staying in his office; his estranged girlfriend and mother of his child, Neasa, is stuck living with Ian's brother. John, Ian's patient, can't bear to be in his house, where he's seen the ghost of his wife, recently killed in a car crash. McPherson has become a master of the ghost story, his plays populated by the undead that many of the living can't seem to vanquish.
No wonder. In 2001 the celebrated Irish playwright, alcoholic and wrestling with his own demons, became gravely ill. The Tony-nominated Shining City, a probing work that doesn't shrink from pain or the truths we can't accept, was his first play after recovering, which gives the work personal resonance for Joseph Adler, longtime director and guiding light of GableStage theater, where it's currently in production. "Sixteen years without a drink," Adler says proudly, gratefully.
Maybe that extra edge accounts for this play's brilliance. The power of McPherson's writing can't be underestimated, but its poetic precision -- it veers from long tales told in one breath to half-spoken sentences trailing off -- requires a deftness the GableStage cast embodies beautifully, capturing the rhythm of speech in a way that dissolves the wall between art and reality, the kind of transcendence we go to the theater hoping for.
A loneliness permeates the play, radiating off characters desperate for something to believe in, but willing to settle for a little warmth. The places they find it are mostly unsatisfying. In a crisis of faith, Ian (Ricky Waugh) has left the church, supported by Neasa (Deborah L. Sherman) until he can become a therapist. But he can't sustain that relationship either, retreating to his office in a rundown part of Dublin. Neasa, desperate for his love, pleads with him to return, inadvertently admitting she slept with a friend to fill the void Ian's distance left even when he was there.
John (Gregg Weiner) comes to Ian for solace in the wake of his wife's death. He's consumed by self-loathing for the distance he kept from his wife while she was alive, looking for absolution -- or maybe an exorcism -- so he can cease punishing himself. Like Neasa, he had a disastrous liaison with someone else and later seeks comfort at a brothel. In an odd way, he gets it from a bouncer who punches him, then reassures, "You'll be all right."
"I was really clinging to the wreckage, y'know?" John says ruefully, speaking for them all.
There are constant echoes. Ian, not quite able to leave behind his priest self, is always telling the others not to worry, "Yer not on yer own," in answer to their refrain, "I've got nowhere to go."
That might be most true for Laurence (John Bixler), a believably twitchy hustler Ian brings back to his office. It's one of the play's most touching moments when, in an anguished gesture, Ian removes his glasses and the two tentatively embrace. Laurence just needs a few quid and some respite from the cold, but his desolation is revealed in what he won't say.
For Ian and John, who each come to a sort of resigned acceptance, it's what they do say. "We just know nothing, really," Ian says. "We're just barely hanging in there," John agrees, before leaving Ian with an unexpected gift.
The play's title is never explained -- the phrase is actually from a Ronald Reagan speech -- but it's a mystery we're willing to live with in return for so many insights into the human heart and soul.
