Shining City (Third Rail Rep)

[January 9th, 2008]

Conor McPherson, the phenomenally talented director and playwright who has dominated the Irish stage for the last decade, gets compared favorably and inevitably to Nobel laureate Harold Pinter. But, although the two do share an affection for ellipses and losers, that’s hardly fair to McPherson.

Pinter’s enormous body of work is steeped in a murky spiritual nihilism that uncovers the darkness within his characters and finds nothing underneath. He’s brilliant, but heartless. McPherson’s protagonists may think themselves adrift in an unjust world, but there’s always someone—or something—watching, and, as selfish and cruel as they may be, he always leaves room for redemption.

In Shining City , the drifters are Ian (Michael O’Connell), an ex-priest turned therapist, and John (Bruce Burkhartsmeier), his first, and possibly only, client. The watchers are ghosts, or a ghost, anyway—John’s wife Mari, who died in a car accident months ago but keeps showing up around the house.

Third Rail’s production showcases the impressive talents of director Slayden Scott Yarbrough, whose touch brings out a lot of congenial humor in what could easily be a very dour show. He also made a fine move in casting Burkhartsmeier, who plays guilt-ridden John as an unexaggeratedly anxious wreck. He fidgets, scratches and tears up subtly and powerfully. As John works through his talking cure in Ian’s shabby office, we start to wonder who really needs the therapy. An apparition in the foyer is one thing, but Ian’s haunted by the perfectly solid mother of his child (Val Landrum) and a crisis of sexual identity.

It’s often said that the magic of theater happens in between spoken lines, but in this production it’s between scenes. Although Ian never really leaves the stage, he doesn’t talk very much—a difficulty that Yarbrough meets with silent interludes that take the place of conventional set changes. O’Connell manages to pack pages of emotion into these brief periods of solitude, wandering around his office doing all those things we do when we think no one’s watching. These moments reveal that Ian is something of a ghost himself, haunting his way though life as he searches for “something else besides all the...you know...the pain and the confusion.” That he eventually finds it, well—that’s why McPherson’s not just an Irish Pinter.