Tue. December 23, 2008
By John Olson
Steppenwolf has often rightly been called courageous, and never more deservedly than this holiday season. At a time of year when so many non-profits trot out their perennial Dickens Christmas Carol or some version of It's a Wonderful Life, this company has the guts to give us not one, but two dark and challenging Christmastime meditations by Irish playwright Conor McPherson. While his Dublin Carol plays upstairs at Steppenwolf, McPherson's recent London and Broadway hit The Seafarer is the attraction downstairs. Though the two plays are equally uncompromising studies of middle-aged alcoholic men facing what is likely their last-chance for redemption, The Seafarer goes down easier with its ample shots of humor.
What initially seems to be a rather conventional and realistic comedy-drama, becomes fantastical when McPherson suggests that for the Devil, Christmas is not a day off, but in fact one of his biggest work days of the year. In the body of an acquaintance Nicky has just made at a neighborhood pub, the Devil (called Mr. Lockhart) is invited to Richard and Sharkey's home for a game of cards. The pot, as is revealed only to Sharkey, will include Sharkey's soul. Tom Irwin's Mr. Lockhart is suitably dangerous, otherworldly and at the same time human enough to allow us to believe he could fool the men into thinking he's simply an affable and mortal stranger invited to a friendly game of cards. It's an electric performance, with his menace perfectly balanced by the earthiness and comic timing of Mahoney, Wilder and Newsome and the unspoken yet clearly evident anguish of Guinan's Sharkey.
Director Randall Arney finds an approach that perfectly blends realism and fantasy, set against a detailed setting of Richard's squalid little cottage designed by Takeshi Kata.
Richard frequently cries out that he has little to live for, but he takes joy in what he has left. Though he's lost his sight and most of his mobility, he delights in walks outside, trips to the pub, enjoying his friends and a good game of cards. That's more joy than his brother or Dublin Carol's John Plunkett are able to find, and McPherson suggests in The Seafarer that it may be reason enough for living. It's a sentiment that might seem as sugary as an angel earning its wings if McPherson didn't take us through a world of filth, hopelessness and perhaps the most terrifying description of Hell before we get to that conclusion and earn the right to believe it.
Photo: John Mahoney, Alan Wilder, Francis Guinan, Randall Newsome and Tom Irwin (Photo by: Michael Brosilow)
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