Brantley reviews : Dark Yarns Casting Light

Walter Kerr Theatre

2 April 1999

If a story is told well enough, you'll follow it anywhere, even when it's leading you to places you never intended to go. Take the plain- spoken, utterly alluring tales unfolded by the denizens of the rural

Irish bar in The Weir, Conor McPherson's beautiful and devious new play at the Walter Kerr Theater. At first, they seem to beckon like comfortingly well-worn paths into realms of folklore both exotic and familiar, Gaelic variations on the sorts of campfire ghost stories you recall from childhood.

Then a moment arrives, and it's hard to say exactly when because you've shed all sense of time, when you realize that you have strayed into territory that scrapes the soul. Suddenly, the subject isn't just things that go bump in the night, but the loss and loneliness that eventually haunt every life. There's a new chill abroad, evoking something more serious than goose flesh, but there is also the thrilling warmth that accompanies the flash of insight.

That the audience of The Weir, which opened on Broadway last night and was first seen in two seasons ago, is surprised and unsettled by this turn from teasing shadows into a more profound

1 darkness shows that 27-year-old Mr. McPherson is a first-rate spinner of yarns.

That the characters onstage seem equally, and convincingly, unsettled and surprised by their own narratives shows that Mr.

McPherson is a first-rate playwright. And under the seamless, gentle direction of Ian Rickson, the show's five actors make an unforgettable case for the impossibility of distinguishing the teller from the tale.

In its first moments, The Weir would seem to reflect the ultimate cliche of a storyteller's opener: ''It was a dark and stormy night.'' The sounds of ominous winds and driving rains can be heard beyond the at first uninhabited set, a scruffy black box of a barroom designed by Rae Smith. The play's characters arrive at staggered intervals, slightly blown and bedraggled, seekers of refuge from the bluster of the outside world. And, yes, of course there is a fire to huddle around.

What Mr. McPherson is doing with this standard Gothic equipment is acknowledging an ages-old tradition, the idea of wayfarers assembling under siege to swap information and accounts of lives as they do in Boccaccio's Decameron. As The Weir continues, it makes a vibrant case for the endurance of that tradition and for the great and essential value of telling stories.

Though a feeling of individual isolation in a baffling and often hostile world pervades The Weir, the stories woven by its characters

2 become solid, if temporary, bridges among them. And if the disturbing mysteries of existence haven't been given explanations, they have been given forms, and that in itself is a victory. The notion of the oppressiveness of the immense quiet of country life recurs in

''The Weir.'' Stories are what break the silence.

At the center of the play are four drinking cronies, the kinds of men who might not have become friends in an urban environment but who have long ago made a comfortable adjustment to one another's quirks and temperaments. There is Jack (), who runs a garage and is the oldest and most theatrically loquacious of the lot, and Jim (Kieran Ahern), a gentle, slightly slow-witted odd-jobs man who lives with his aged, ailing mother.

Finbar (Dermot Crowley) is a splashy fellow who wears a pink shirt and flashes 20-pound notes and is a local success in real estate.

The pub's owner and bartender is Brendan (Brendan Coyle), who is the most taciturn of the quartet, which by no means suggests that he is less eloquent.

It should go without saying that a stranger is introduced into this company, someone whose very presence will change the course of the men's habitual conversation. One of Mr. McPherson's more cunning inspirations is to make this prototype a woman (played by

Michelle Fairley), a trespasser of sorts in a masculine domain who automatically raises the level of self-consciousness in the room and turns each of the men into even more of a performer than he is

3 normally. Named Valerie, she is a newcomer to the region and has rented a house from Finbar.

The Weir is built around five monologues delivered by four of the characters. All but one have a supernatural element, and each of them is effectively self-contained. The first, told by Jack with the flourish of a homespun Danny Kaye, is benignly spooky, a minor- key tale of fairies and spectral knocks on doors. But it ingeniously creates a foundation for everything that follows, opening the floodgates, or the weir (dam) of the title, for an accelerating rush of revelations that cut closer and closer to the bone.

To say much more about these stories would be unfair. One can list a few of their elements without giving too much away; you learn, for instance, why Finbar quit smoking years ago and why Valerie has moved from city to country. Everything here, of course, is in the why, and though Finbar's tale may seem slight in comparison with

Valerie's devastating chapter of autobiography, they are cut from the same cloth, a shimmering weave of the mundane and the ineffable.

Each of the stories, in fact, deepens and expands the others.

And the order in which they are arranged offers a master lesson in dramatic construction. A dimension of otherworldly menace is increasingly heightened in the succeeding monologues until the very last one, which like the first belongs to Jack. It is a plain story of lost love, with no ghostly shadows at all, yet it is absolutely of a piece with everything that has gone before.

4

It is to Mr. McPherson's credit that you are aware of these patterns only after the play is over, and that while you are watching it the monologues never register as discrete dramatic contrivances.

Unlike the work of another bright light of the British theater, Patrick

Marber (currently represented on Broadway by Closer), Mr.

McPherson's doesn't call immediate attention to mechanics and symmetries.

The stories of The Weir emerge out of an organic flow of conversation, partly the formulaic banter among long-time friends, partly prosaic exchanges on subjects like horse racing and the foreign visitors who invade the countryside in the summertime. Mr. Rickson and the performers are expert in conveying the idiosyncratic ritual among drinking buddies, and what happens when it is disrupted, as when Valerie asks for the unexpected: a glass of white wine.

It's remarkable, when you think about it, how little of this talk is merely atmospheric filler. The play's lyricism is a matter of steady accumulation rather than bursts of flowery metaphors, a stealthy poetry reflected even in Paule Constable's exquisitely graded lighting. Every phrase has its purposeful place and reason, but never make the mistake of letting on that they know this.

All have appeared in previous incarnations of the play, and the ensemble work is so seamless that it seems unjust to single out one performance. You're always aware of the connections among the characters onstage, the ways in which they chafe, comfort and occasionally embarrass each other. A moment in which Jim sits down

5 stiffly by the newly arrived Valerie is turned into a gloriously subtle study in social awkwardness by Mr. Ahern and Ms. Fairley. And what Mr. Coyle does with the simple act of pouring a glass of wine is a sly comic marvel.

Mr. Coyle, who won a Laurence Olivier Award (the London equivalent of the Tony) for his role in ''The Weir,'' is the only character who doesn't tell a proper story. Yet by the evening's end, you feel you know Brendan as intimately as any of the others on stage. It's hard to think of a recent performance in which the act of listening, by all of the performers, takes on such articulate dramatic weight.

The monologues of The Weir are really dialogues between narrator and listeners, just as every play is a dialogue between itself and its audience. This fine, stirring and generous production reminds us of the priceless worth of that exchange. We may have begun the evening as eavesdroppers; by its end, we have fully and transportingly joined the conversation.

The Seafarer

A Devil of a Christmas

Booth Theater

7 December 2007

6

Do you know how you behave when you’re drunk, I mean, really drunk? If the answer is yes, then you’ve never been that drunk, since the curse and kindness of vast quantities of alcohol is that they obliterate self-awareness.

This physiological fact of life makes the gorgeous, vitally intelligent performances in , the new play by Conor

McPherson that opened last night at the Booth Theater, all the more remarkable. Everyone in this dark and enthralling Christmas fable of despair and redemption descends at some point to oceanic depths of drunkenness, including a sinister fellow who is, shall we say, not of this world.

Yet as written and directed, the five carefully shaped characters of The Seafarer are blessedly free of the blurry, slurry clichés of acting intoxicated that can drive a sensitive theatergoer to, well, drink. Directed by Mr. McPherson, one of the finest ensembles to grace a Broadway stage in years uncovers the soul-defining clarity within the drunkard’s haze. Alcohol may be a great leveler, but as these men confirm with spectacular style, it is also a great individualizer.

Five poker-playing Irish drunks, bumping into the furniture of an ill-kept house in on Christmas Eve, may not sound like your ideal people to spend the holidays with. But as unlikely as it sounds, “The Seafarer” may just be the pick-me-up play of the season.

7

Structured as a long night’s journey into day, with truly frightening glimpses of a darkness that stretches into eternity, The

Seafarer turns out to be a thinking-person’s alternative to It’s a

Wonderful Life as a flagon of Christmas cheer. It’s heavier on the stinging sauce than that film, Frank Capra’s best loved, and lighter on the syrup. And it tingles with its author’s acute and authentic sense of what is knowable and unknowable in life. Of course it could be argued that it’s hard to know anything if you’re looking at the world through a glass of whiskey. But don’t think for a second that the prodigiously gifted Mr. McPherson, who has spoken publicly of his own battles with alcohol, has written a theatrical variation on The

Lost Weekend.

In The Seafarer alcoholism isn’t primarily a medical condition but an existential one. As in earlier plays like The Weir and Shining

City, Mr. McPherson is considering the impenetrable, scary mystery that is being alive and the blundering ways that poor humans deal with it. The Seafarer portrays the forms of amnesia and anesthesia that allow people to wake up with themselves.

Not that you think in such lofty terms while you’re listening to the liveliest, funniest dialogue yet written by Mr. McPherson, who usually specializes in reflective arias. Yet as soon as the ragtag clan of friends starts to assemble in the squalid of the elderly

Richard Harkin (the brilliant Jim Norton) and Sharky (David Morse), his woebegone younger brother, you’ll have at least an intuitive sense of repeated images that will build and echo.

8

That of sight, for instance. Richard is blind, the result of a recent accident on Halloween, when he fell into a Dumpster. Ivan

Curry (), a hapless fellow who has adopted the Harkins’ house as a holiday dormitory, has lost his glasses and spends the play, “feeling my way around.”

Then there’s blind drunkenness, a state achieved by all of the men, including the late arrivals Nicky Giblin (Sean Mahon), a good- looking but feckless lad now keeping company with Sharky’s ex, and

Mr. Lockhart (Ciarán Hinds), an incongruously dapper stranger who initiates a poker game in which the stakes are damningly high.

Though Mr. Lockhart initially seems to blend right into the boozy camaraderie, it gradually emerges that he is a man apart, if man is the right word. When he speaks to Sharky, who is doing his best to have a booze-free Christmas, Mr. Lockhart describes himself in ways that bring to mind the main character of Milton’s Paradise

Lost. Yes, he’s the very Devil, though his accounts of his unbearable loneliness suggest that hell is just a cosmically magnified version of daily existence.

Hard-core secularists, even some of those who accepted the ghosts and vampires of Mr. McPherson’s earlier work, may be unsettled by the deeply Christian mythology that infuses The

Seafarer, which was inspired by an eighth-century Anglo-Saxon poem of the same title. But the play makes suspending skepticism easy.

9

Even when Satan announces his identity, you feel you’re in the midst of real, fully detailed life. Every aspect of this production glows with verisimilitude, starting with Rae Smith’s perfectly shabby costumes and set, which happily features one of the saddest

Christmas trees ever seen.

More crucially, you believe unconditionally in every one of the characters (even Mr. Lockhart). While avoiding straightforward exposition, the hearty conversation creates complete and subtle portraits of self-sabotaging lives scarred by unconscious cruelty, willed forgetfulness, fractured relationships and, above all, a sense of loss. Everyone in The Seafarer is forever losing something, both as small as an unfinished drink and as big as a family.

Only Mr. Norton and Mr. Hill are from the original cast of the production that I saw at the National Theater in London a year ago, yet this ensemble feels even more of a piece. Mr. Norton’s peevish, self-delighted autocrat will generate the most talk (and surely all sorts of prizes to add to the Olivier Award he picked up in London).

But everyone wears his part as if it were a favorite pair of old work gloves. Mr. Hill’s faltering body language as the terminally nearsighted Ivan remains priceless. Mr. Mahon portrays a shallow man without merely coasting on the surface.

As the central adversaries, Mr. Morse (of How I Learned to

Drive) and Mr. Hinds (of the Broadway production of Closer) give the show a diamond-hard dramatic center it lacked in London. Mr.

10

Morse locates exactly the fear of going wrong in the hulking, taciturn

Sharky’s careful movements and measured words. Mr. Hinds is uncanny in balancing the mortal failings of Mr. Lockhart’s borrowed body and the immortal rage and agony of the demon within.

Most McPherson plays leave you feeling shaken and somber.

This one concludes on a chord of sentimental uplift that may cause some audience members to feel cheated; in classic dramatic terms it’s as unwarranted as the happy endings of Shakespeare’s lesser romances.

But playwrights are the gods of their own universes. And in a season when many of the best new movies, like No Country for Old

Men and Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, are bare of any sense of salvation, Mr. McPherson’s allowance of a provisional, redeeming grace has its warming charm. You don’t have to believe in it to be moved by it. Besides, transporting acting like this has an amazing grace all its own.

The Night Alive

Among the Debris, Something Divine

12 December 2013

Atlantic Theatre

11

Something bright and beautiful pulses in the shadows of The Night

Alive, the extraordinary new play by Conor McPherson that opened on Thursday night in a Donmar Warehouse production imported from London by the Atlantic Theater Company.

I do not use the word extraordinary simply as a critic tacking on a blurb-friendly adjective. Mr. McPherson, the Irish dramatist who gave us The Weir and , has a singular gift for making the ordinary glow with an extra dimension, like a gentle phosphorescence waiting to be coaxed into radiance.

In this case, it may take you a while to perceive that glow, though you won’t want for diversion before you do. What exists on the stage of the Linda Gross Theater initially appears to be all murk and squalor.

Strewed with garbage bags and clothes and festering objects of dubious identity, this is the Dublin residence of someone who, as your mother might observe, has never been taught to pick up after himself. As designed with unforgiving precision by Soutra Gilmour, it is not a place you would want to try to navigate in the dark.

Even the person who lives here, Tommy (a marvelous Ciarán

Hinds), a mountainous slob of a man, stumbles upon making his entrance, having returned from what he had assumed would be an uneventful errand. He went out for some chips. He has come back with a young woman, whom he has never met before and who is covered in blood.

12

What follows is a group portrait of five highly imperfect people fumbling in the dark, which is true even when it’s daytime. As one character says, with the plain-spoken lyricism that runs through Mr.

McPherson’s dialogue, “It’s like my eyes have been taken out, and I just can’t see what’s in front of me, like it’s always nighttime, so when nighttime really comes, you think it feels like a relief.”

All of the people we meet here, embodied with uncompromising and sometimes ugly vividness by a superb cast, have made messes of their lives. That includes even the fastidious

Maurice (Jim Norton), the older uncle from whom Tommy rents the room he has turned into such a rubbish heap.

In the weeks covered by , which is directed with an auteur’s thoroughness of vision by Mr. McPherson,

Tommy’s slovenly digs will also become home to Aimee

(Caoilfhionn Dunne) — she’s the bloody figure from the first scene

— and Doc (Michael McElhatton), who assists Tommy in his fitful career as an odd-job man. Then there’s Kenneth (Brian Gleeson), an innocuous-seeming stranger who shows up one night to wreak memorable havoc.

Tommy describes Doc as “disabled.” (Doc’s thoughts, Tommy says, “will always, always, be five to 10 minutes behind everybody else.”) But then, so are all these characters, in their inability to make sense of, or find order in, their lives.

13

To be human is to be disabled, in Mr. McPherson’s view.

That’s what separates people into isolated zones of idiosyncrasy and also what makes them reach out for one another. This is the source of the play’s boisterous comedy as well as its aching poignancy.

Physical attempts to connect are the stuff of both slapstick and the sort of suspense you associate with horror movies. Sex, as it’s described to us, is a lonely business. Aimee, a sometime prostitute, limits her services to manual stimulation, which Tommy says is fine by him. “The full job, and all that huffing and puffing, it’s so unbecoming,” he says, with bluff gallantry.

When Tommy talks on the phone to his estranged wife about their two children, it at first seems as if he were ranting to himself, because he’s using a headset. Common gestures of friendship, like patting someone’s shoulder, register as stilted and unnatural.

When a drunken Maurice collapses into grief after an anniversary funeral Mass for his dead wife that was attended by exactly three people, Tommy restrains him in a headlock that is as close as anyone comes to a full embrace. (Maurice’s wife died three years before, after falling on the ice; he didn’t take her arm, as he normally would have, because they weren’t speaking.)

A sense of families splintered into atoms — of siblings divided and parents forcibly separated from their children — pervades The

Night Alive. Doc is forever showing up at Tommy’s place, because

14 his sister’s boyfriend keeps throwing him out of their house. You can understand why.

Though blessed with odd moments of extrasensory insight, Doc is a prattling nuisance. And his relationship with Tommy brings to mind that of Art Carney’s pesky Norton to Jackie Gleason’s impatient Ralph in The Honeymooners.

The Night Alive might register as a sitcom uncomfortably spliced into a tragedy, except for that underlying and connective sense of the numinous. Whenever you think you’re settling into a familiar groove of dialogue, with eccentric losers engaged in antic bickering, the play ascends to a plane that can only be called transcendent.

Something like divine grace animates a glorious vignette in which Tommy, Aimee and Doc break into spontaneous dance to

Marvin Gaye singing “What’s Going On,” their awkward movements taking on an uncanny poetry. In contrast, a late-night encounter between Doc and Kenneth has a feeling of satanic evil, of pure motiveless malice unleashed upon an uncomprehending world. (If you know Mr. McPherson’s work, particularly his Seafarer— seen on Broadway in 2007, with Mr. Hinds and Mr. Norton — you’ll know the Devil is a very active presence in his universe.)

The otherworldliness of these scenes is accomplished partly by subtle shifts in lighting (by Neil Austin) and sound (by Gregory

Clarke). Music in The Night Alive always feels like an epiphany, a

15 heaven-sent vision of a symmetry we can never fully understand but feel mighty grateful for.

The title of Gaye’s song reverberates throughout. What is going on? “Marvin, you said it there, man,” Tommy says, high on adrenaline after dancing. “That is the question. The man who answers that one will ...” He doesn’t finish the sentence. After all, we can’t ever fully explain a world that often seems cruel and arbitrary.

But, for those enchanted moments when he and his friends are moving to Gaye’s music — and in the play’s benediction of a final scene, which seems to take place outside of time — there’s an ineffable, all-answering rhythm to life. That’s the redemption of great art, whether it comes from a song out of Motown or a play out of

Dublin.

Web links to Other Reviews:

St Nicholas: ‘A Most Dramatic Drama Critic’, 18 March 1998-

http://www.nytimes.com/1998/03/18/theater/theater-review-a-most-

dramatic-drama-critic.html

This Lime Tree Bower: ‘A Wealth Of Ambiguity, An Economy Of Words’,

20 May 1999, https://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/20/theater/theater-

review-a-wealth-of-ambiguity-an-economy-of-words.html

The Good Thief: ‘A Hired Thug Who Lacks The Typical Heart of Gold, 13

March 2001, https://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/13/theater/theater-

review-a-hired-thug-who-lacks-the-typical-heart-of-gold.html

16

Dublin Carol: ‘When Talk Is the Cure For the Morning After’, 21 February

2003, https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/21/movies/theater-review-

when-talk-is-the-cure-for-the-morning-after.html

Shining City: ‘Conor McPherson's Study of Loneliness in a Crowd’, 10

May 2006,

https://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/10/theater/reviews/10shin.html

The Birds: Less-Than-Fierce-Feathered Nature in Revolt, 15 September

2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/16/theater/the-birds-

review.html

Girl from the North Country: Rolling Stones Gather Regrets, 26 July 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/26/theater/girl-from-north-country-review- bob-dylan.html

17