McPherson's "Shining City' by Theatre Exile (3rd review)

Conor McPherson's talky new play, Shining City, is another in his attempts to find meaning in a God-abandoned world. Beckett, of course, dramatized this quest better than anyone. Pinter took it a step further, conjuring up a post-theistic cosmos in which human action, ungrounded in any normative order, was seemingly random, often violent, and largely incomprehensible.

McPherson is not in this league, but his quirky characters exist in a kind of supernatural penumbra, and they show plenty of damage. John (Scott Greer), a middle-aged widower who believes himself haunted by his wife's ghost, is referred to a psychotherapist, Ian (William Zielinski), an ex-priest and lapsed Catholic who operates out of his own shabby apartment.

It isn't clear who's more in need of assistance, especially when we see Ian in the process of breaking up with his own spouse, Neasa (Genevieve Perrier), in a very messy scene. In any case, Ian can only nod sympathetically as John, in a vast monologue, spins out a guilty tale of alienation and betrayal that may, as he unprovably but not unjustly suspects, have led to his wife's death.

John's tormented confession is the dramatic heart of the play, and Scott Greer's performance, slowly building to its climax and never missing a beat, is a tour de force. But it leads to no immediate catharsis, for John can't forgive himself and the ex-priest Ian can't offer him the absolution that, in a former culture, would have provided forgiveness from without.

Freud's Catholic connection

Instead, Ian can only murmur sympathetically and offer platitudes about the "good work" of their session. Freud's talking cure was an obvious substitute for the confessional (it was no accident that psychoanalysis was born in Catholic Vienna), but not all therapists are Freud, and Ian is a particularly weak reed, as a subsequent scene involving another itinerant visitor, Laurence (Keith J. Conallen) makes even clearer.

McPherson's theme isn't so much human weakness— the basis of all religions— as of lostness, the condition of their absence. John doesn't have a clue who he is, and so cannot lead his life— rather, he seems entirely led by it.

Ian is more reflective, but no more in charge: Indeed, the very idea of personal autonomy, the practical goal of analysis, seems absurd in these two matchstick figures, buffeted between gusts of loneliness and need and unable to negotiate even the first steps of adult desire.

At the end, they both profess themselves ready for a fresh start, but McPherson drops a hammer to suggest, as in last season's The Seafarer, that if God has gone missing the Devil is very much about.

Weak characters

William Zielinski's Ian makes a slender foil to Scott Greer's massively baffled, self-pitying John, and Genevieve Perrier gives us pause twice as a woman scorned. Keith Conallen's Laurence could use more edge, though the real problem is the superfluousness of the scene in which he appears.

You can do action or character in theater (of course, it's a good idea to do both). Pinter's characters are unsympathetic— sharks in a strange sea— but we watch on the edge of our seats to see what they'll do. Here, McPherson's are mostly too weak to do anything but walk out on each other or (no better) cling ineffectually. In neither case is there a basis for genuine dramatic conflict.

Graham Green's perspective

McPherson has a keen ear for the broken rhythms of dialogue, and director Matt Pfeiffer weaves them together with a shrewd sense of cadence and pacing. What can't be erased, or raised to some higher level of compassion, is the faint distaste the characters arouse.

Graham Greene, that specialist in the particularly sticky guilt of ex-priests, would have pronounced them seedy. But Greene still inhabited a Catholic world in which grace and redemption were always possible, however remote.

McPherson has no similar hope to offer us, only a procession of lost, dim souls between one nowhere and another. Shining City is a play whose title mocks its contents.♦


To read another reiew by Pamela and Gresham Riley, click here.
To read another review by Jim Rutter, click here.
To read another review by SaraKay Smullens, click here.