If you're in the mood for a Christmas story with a supernatural element but want to branch out from "A Christmas Carol" and "It's a Wonderful Life," get yourself to the Booth Theatre in New York and see "The Seafarer." Mysterywriter sold me and our friend Lynn on getting tickets to this some time ago on the grounds that it was written by Conor McPherson, one of our favorite contemporary Irish playwrights, and starred Ciarán Hinds, aka Persuasion's Captain Wentworth (pause for sigh). Little did we know what a treat we were in for. (Or how lucky we'd be that the stagehand strike settled just in the nick of time.) According to the play's website, here's what it's about:
The Seafarer is a chilling new play about the sea, Ireland, and the power of myth. It's Christmas Eve and Sharky has returned to Dublin to look after his irascible, aging brother who's recently gone blind. Old drinking buddies Ivan and Nicky are holed up at the house too, hoping to play some cards. But with the arrival of a stranger from the distant past, the stakes are raised ever higher. In fact, Sharky may be playing for his very soul.
That sounds so dour. But it isn't. After seeing McPherson's intense "Shining City" last month at the Studio Theatre in Washington, I wouldn't have imagined laughing myself silly to another of his plays a few weeks later. When curmudgeonly, older brother Richard comes home drunk from getting some "bits" for Christmas dinner, he stumbles into the house singing his own Christmas medley (including "O come let us redore him" and "Oh the weather outside is frightening"); it's silly, but you can't help but laugh at the joy he takes in singing in the face of his miserable condition. Or at the way Ivan nimbly picks his way around the house in a drink-induced and half-blinded stupor (he's lost his glasses). Like "Shining City," "The Seafarer" deals with serious themes -- guilt, loneliness, faith -- and you're constantly bracing yourself for a tragic turn. But the play is ultimately, and unexpectedly, uplifting.
Ciarán Hinds plays the dapper, mysterious stranger, Mr. Lockhart, who shows up Christmas Eve for a card game, and eventually reveals himself to be the devil himself. Although this sounds hokey, it doesn't play hokey. The devil hasn't appeared so tragic, or so human, since Milton's Paradise Lost. As Chris Jones of the Chicago Tribune said, "to understand hell, we're told, you just have to recall when 'you see all the people who seem to live in another world all snuggled up together in the warmth of a tavern or a cozy little house, and you just walk and walk and walk and you're on your own and nobody knows who you are.'"
And yet you don't walk out of the play slackjawed looking to drown your own sorrows. As Ben Brantley put it in the New York Times last Friday,
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.
If you live in New York, or you've heading up there to do a little Christmas shopping, tickets are still available at Telecharge.com
Between Broadway and 8th Avenue
New York, NY 10036
Comments