Irish playwright Conor McPherson chases away the demons
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Playwright Conor McPherson's "The Weir," "Dublin Carol" and "St. Nicholas" have all been performed in Pittsburgh.
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According to Jim Norton, the actor most closely associated with the Conor McPherson plays that have flown out from Ireland to London, New York, Pittsburgh and the other theater centers of the English-speaking world, "storytelling is the only therapy Ireland believes in -- it helps to deal with the demons."
Storytelling and demons certainly both feature in McPherson's recent play, "The Seafarer," which is receiving its Pittsburgh premiere at City Theatre. The story it tells is of four lonely middle-aged friends who gather to drink, tell stories and play poker on Christmas Eve in a scruffy apartment outside Dublin, where they're joined by a mysterious Mr. Lockhart, who is either the Devil or his emissary.
That's one demon, the biggest. But his entrance is made possible by the other demons that bedevil these men, chiefly alcohol and the deep, cold loneliness that is signaled by the play's title, taken from a famous eighth-century Anglo-Saxon poem. As Burton Raffel's translation puts it:
... No man sheltered
On the quiet fairness of earth can feel
How wretched I was, drifting through winter
On an ice-cold sea, whirled in sorrow,
Alone in a world blown clear of love,
Hung with icicles. ...
No kinsman could offer comfort there,
To a soul left drowning in desolation.
McPherson's men, however, have each other and maybe a spark of love. Two are kinsmen -- Sharky, whose soul is most in peril, and Richard, his older brother, whose blindness gives some necessary insight.
Mostly, they have their humor. Against all odds, "The Seafarer" has plenty of comedy, albeit sometimes grim. Laughter and verbal dexterity are weapons with which the Irish have often faced down adversity, to the considerable benefit of the English-speaking theater of four centuries. "Succinct, startling and eerie, and the funniest McPherson play to date," said one of the New York critics when it won Norton a Tony Award last spring.
McPherson, 37, is a leader in the latest wave of Irish exports, along with Martin McDonagh and Marina Carr. Before them came Brian Friel, Frank McGuinness and Tom Murphy, and earlier, G.B. Shaw, J.M. Synge, Sean O'Casey and Samuel Beckett. Further back, the Irish hall of fame boasts Wilde, Sheridan, Goldsmith and Congreve.
Although City Theatre specializes in new plays, predominantly American, Irish plays have also served it well, among them McDonagh's "The Beauty Queen of Leenane" and Friel's "Molly Sweeney."
In Pittsburgh, McPherson's best-known play is probably "The Weir," which starred Tom Atkins at the Pubic Theater in 2000. But just a few months ago, Pittsburgh Irish & Classical Theatre staged not one but two McPherson plays: "Dublin Carol," another lonely night of the soul drama, starring Larry John Meyers, and "St. Nicholas," a monologue play about a theater critic who takes up with vampires, starring Martin Giles, who's also in the cast of "Seafarer.
"Seafarer," "Dublin Carol" and "St. Nicholas" are all set at Christmas, a potent image of light, rebirth and the hope that counteracts darkness, loneliness and despair. The interplay of all those elements marks "The Seafarer" as a very fine play.
For background on Irish drama in Pittsburgh see Three Irish playwrights transform Pittsburgh into the emerald city.
First Published January 22, 2009 12:00 am
