Theatre in Review: Port Authority (Irish Repertory Theatre)

	James Russell. Photo: Carol Rosegg

"I don't know if I'm happy or sad," says Joe, one of the trio of lost souls who make up the cast of Port Authority. He could be speaking for all of them. The lovelorn Kevin; terrified, alcoholic Dermot; and the elderly Joe all have stories to tell about themselves, the main themes being choices not made and crucial moments missed. Most of the time, effective drama hinges on action, the conflict of opposing forces; here, Conor McPherson makes magic from characters recalling the moment when the door of possibility slammed shut.

The men of Port Authority describe their failures with a kind of plainspoken poetry that lays bare their souls for all to see. Kevin recalls moving, against his parents' wishes, into an apartment in Dublin with three roommates. With no job and no particular goals, he admits, wryly, it "was like pretending to make a decision." He shares the place with two male friends and the beautiful Clare, whose boyfriends are "rich and spoiled and better-looking than us." Yet, even when he falls into an agreeably erotic relationship with a waitress/college student name Trish, there is a connection between him and Clare that both silently acknowledge yet are unwilling to disturb.

Dermot, an accountant of no special distinction, with a resume that is better left unread, finds himself inexplicably hired by a posh money-management firm. Faced with the prospect of socializing with colleagues well above his normal social grade, he deceitfully leaves behind his wife, Mary, whom he deems too embarrassing for public view. ("She took up half the couch and watched EastEnders," he says, comparing her to his new colleagues' chic spouses.) Frightened of making the wrong impression and overfortified by too many gin and tonics, he makes a total fool of himself at a company dinner -- but there are more devastating comeuppances in store.

Joe, who lives in an old-age home, is surprised by an out-of-the-blue gift that forces him to recall the defining moment of his adult life, when his placid existence as a husband and father was disturbed by an overwhelming, and unasked for, attraction to Marion, a neighbor. Trying to explain the inexplicable, he warns, "If you dream that someone's loving you and you wake up looking for them and sending signals to all and sundry, saying, 'Was it you? Was it you who loved me?' you'll fucking find them, mark my words."

Time and again in Port Authority, a simple gesture or banal moment will suddenly glow with deeper meaning. Kevin, shopping for party supplies with Clare, recalls how they suddenly seemed like a long-married couple: "She turned at one point and put her hand on my belly while we were looking at frozen pizzas. And for ages we couldn't move." The self-loathing Dermot describes "catching Mary smiling and seeing what there was to see in her when she was younger, but we weren't younger now." Joe, summing up his marriage, says "there was nothing wrong nor right about us," that his wife kept house and he earned their living: "There was none of your 'everyone's on valium because they're all confused about who they are.'"

In any case, decisive action remains beyond each man's reach. Dermot, for whom no detail is too mortifying, describes a company junket to Los Angeles for a rock concert, which spirals out of control, thanks to drugs and liquor. (McPherson writes more harrowingly about substance abuse than just about any other modern dramatist.) Staggering out of a portable loo where he has been snorting cocaine, he says, "The smell of shit was overwhelming and a roar went up from eighty thousand people and I spun out into the night, quite convinced that bats were going to attack me. And I had a bottle of vodka in my hand and I cowered in a field, feeling that my life was in great danger." Humiliation, not danger, lurks around the corner in a professional disaster, followed by a moment of truth with Mary that is both an act of love and a brutal unmasking. Kevin drifts from Clare, and, after their final meeting, he muses, "We didn't trust it, I suppose. So that was that. And we soldiered on off down our different roads." Joe, left alone with Marion, is caught trying to steal a photograph of her as a child. He explains it away, but it is an act that will reverberate over several decades.

And, as each tale unfolds, tiny events -- I'll leave it to you to discover them -- are shown to connect all three narratives. They're little more than a series of accidental circumstances, but they serve to bind together all three men in a private universe of loss and longing.

A text filled with Irish slang and local Dublin references, Port Authority is often challenging to American ears; it requires three very strong performances, which happily it has here under the precise, carefully controlled direction of Ciarán O'Reilly. James Russell's Kevin tells his story with a wry smile and the insouciance of a young man who finds everything amusing; it's only near the end that he lets us see the terrible sadness within. There's a haunted look in the eyes of Peter Maloney's Joe, whether he is trading quips with the nun who looks after him, grousing about the lack of privacy in his residence, or recalling the moment when something profound nearly took place between him and Marion. Billy Carter's Dermot is an unsparing portrait of a man who can barely face himself in the mirror, his search for escape driving him to ever more self-destructive acts.

O'Reilly's production fits nicely in the DR2 Theatre, where the Irish Rep will perform while its home on West 22nd Street undergoes renovation. Charlie Corcoran's set places all three men against a seawall made of flagstones -- at times it resembles a prison wall -- with the sky visible in the distance. Michael Gottlieb's tasteful lighting, with its delicate hints or color, adds to the production's melancholy mood. Linda Fisher's costumes and M. Florian Staab's sound are both solid contributions.

But it's the words that count here, and the three remarkable performances. McPherson has an astonishing insight into the bleak details of lives lived without the consolations of love. Dermot, returning from his Los Angeles bacchanal, says, "I was like one of those figures in the religious paintings where God is pointing for them all to go to Hell." But, in a sense, all of the men in Port Authority have been exiled from paradise. Their tragedy is that they know why.--David Barbour