Theatre in Review: Shining City (Irish Repertory Theatre)

	Matthew Broderick, Billy Carter. Photo: Carol Rosegg

Conor McPherson's plays are fragile things -- hothouse blooms, really -- and when it comes to their care and feeding, the Irish Rep really has the knack. I didn't see the company's acclaimed revival of The Weir, but it did exemplary work with Port Authority, and it does so again with Shining City -- which, among other things, features the best performance Matthew Broderick has given in years. A play that, on Broadway a decade ago, seemed more than a little dull comes across in Ciarán O'Reilly's production as an acute study in urban loneliness.

One reason for this may be the size of the Irish Rep's auditorium. McPherson's plays are the theatrical equivalent of short stories, offering intensely close-up views of a handful of characters -- and they can sometimes feel dwarfed in even the smallest of Broadway houses. Here, they get the intimacy they need to thrive. (This production marks the company's return to its newly renovated 22nd Street home. Among other things, the dreaded stage right seating area, where one spent the evening looking at the actors' backs, has been eliminated in favor of a small mezzanine, an arrangement that should guarantee a better viewing experience for all.) In this space, the actors are free to engage in the highly detailed work that illuminates the heartache eating away at McPherson's characters.

As it happens, there is plenty of heartache to go around. We are in the rather downmarket office of Ian, who has recently opened his therapy practice. (It's a drab, industrial space, reached by climbing several flights of stairs -- that is, if you manage to get past the treacherously unstable security system.) Ian's main patient is John, a middle-aged widower who, quite suddenly, has experienced ghostly appearances by his late wife; so persistent are these sightings that he is afraid to return at night to the home they shared together. Instead, he has decamped to a bed and breakfast, where he has begun to wonder if he isn't quietly going mad.

As John, Broderick sheds the mannerisms that sometimes accrue to his performances in comedies and musicals, adopting an easy conversational manner that, at first, belies his fierce commitment to the role. A middle-aged man of no distinction -- he works as a salesman for a catering company -- John describes how he ended up in a conventional marriage that, for all its surface placidity, offered little in the way of satisfaction: "You see, we'd, I think, we'd been slightly left behind, a little bit, you know? All our... all our friends, they, you know, they had families. And, that...that... bound them together, you know?" An attempt at a fling with a female acquaintance is a mortifying disaster, adding only to his burden of guilt. (They arrange, via text, to meet when he is shopping for a coat for his wife; she continues to wear the coat long after, unwittingly sending him a silent reminder of his unfaithfulness.) It isn't until, when describing an equally disastrous visit to a prostitute, John suddenly breaks off, too choked with emotion to speak, that you realize how subtly Broderick has sketched his portrait of one ordinary man's desolation.

If Broderick's stunningly seamless work seemingly dominates the evening, it is only the half of it. In McPherson's dramatic scheme, John and Ian are mirror images of each other. (They even share the same name, Ian being the Celtic form of John.) Ian, who describes his job as helping "people who might just feel a little bit stuck," is feeling pretty stuck himself. An ex-priest in his 40s, he has drifted into a relationship with Neasa, the mother of his child. Now they are living apart and Ian is desperately looking for the exit. In the play's most scorching scene, Neasa, fed up with being stashed away with Ian's hostile relatives and furiously detailing her bill of grievances, learns, to her stunned surprise, that the separation is permanent. Ian's promises to take care of her and their child are nothing next to his savage cry of "I can't do it," a remark that in its unexpected violence permanently forecloses on any future for them together. McPherson, who is best known for penning long narrative speeches and for evoking moods both eerie and elegiac, here shows off an unexpected skill at creating brutal confrontations: Billy Carter, as Ian, and Lisa Dwan, as Neasa, make a formidable pair of combatants. And, in a reflection of John's halting infidelities, Ian picks up Laurence, a married, working-class bloke, his hand mangled in an accident, who freelances as a prostitute. The encounter between Ian, who has never before gone near a man, and Laurence, who, while not unfriendly, has been around this block many times before, is shot through with tension and longing. (Laurence also creates an indelible picture of his night life, wandering an area outside the city as married men cruise by, looking for someone to give them quick satisfaction.)

By the conclusion of this scene, one can see how deftly, using only four characters, McPherson has sketched in a Dublin populated by lost souls, each of them looking for a kind of happiness that remains permanently out of reach. Their displacement, in the playwright's view, is spiritual as well, and this marks the point where Shining City runs into a bit of trouble. McPherson loves nothing more than a good ghost story -- The Weir consists of several, and St. Nicholas posits a drama critic co-opted by a band of vampires -- and he can't stop himself from bringing in a ghostly surprise at the eleventh hour. There is a certain dramatic basis for this -- Ian has traded in his career as a spiritual advisor for the secular career of a therapist, and has spent the bulk of the play quietly bringing John to the conclusion that his hauntings are really the expression of his guilty soul -- but the play still concludes on a twist that seems more appropriate for an old Twilight Zone episode.

Still, under O'Reilly's sure-handed direction, the entire cast delivers superbly: Carter is, arguably, the standout, drawing strong contrasts between Ian's assured handling of John; his raw, white-hot battle with Neasa; and his achingly vulnerable episode with Laurence (a carefully shaded gem of a performance by James Russell.) Adding to the atmosphere are Charlie Corcoran's set, which speaks volumes about the transitory nature of Ian's existence; Martha Hally's incisively detailed costumes; Michael Gottlieb's meticulously detailed lighting, and M. Florian Staab's sound design, which combines a battery of effects -- music on the radio, birdsong, and traffic noises, among others -- with reinforcement for Ryan Rumery's original music, which blends guitar, piano, and percussion to create a melancholy, introspective mood.

It's exciting to see Irish Rep back in the business of presenting some of the best that contemporary Irish drama has to offer, especially in a production as revelatory as this. McPherson has been produced by several of New York's top theatre companies, but his work never shines so brightly as when brought to life by this troupe. -- David Barbour