Review: Different Stages Theatre's Shining City

Different Stages' Shining City (photo by Steve Rogers)

Irish playwright Conor McPherson is a master storyteller. His tall tales are as powerful as they are poetic, and though each is a unique and well-crafted creation, they share signature tropes that make them immediately recognizable as his. They tend to take place over a short period of time, which generates a strong sense of immediacy and urgency in their telling. The person telling the story does so with extended monologues that are more confessional than theatrical. And there is always a quirky, otherworldly element – vampires in St. Nicholas and the Devil himself in The Seafarer, for instance – that bites at the heels of the play's otherwise stark and quite dramatic realism.

But the devil is in the details when staging his plays, which is a lesson being learned the hard way by Different Stages in its current production of Shining City.

At the center of this play, first produced in the Emerald Isle in 2004, is a middle-aged middleman for a catering supply company named John (Rick Felkins), who we meet during his therapy sessions with Ian (Sam Grimes). John is, in fact, one of the first patients of Ian's, who has recently left the priesthood and hung up his shingle in a rundown office building in downtown Dublin (rendered, it seems, on a tight budget by scenic designer Elaine Jacobs). John is a recent widower and keeps seeing his wife, Mari, who died in a car crash. Her visitations to their home so frighten him that he is living in a local bed-and-breakfast and too incapacitated to go to work.

It is not just John's wife that haunts him. He is also stalked by suffocating loneliness due to his inability to connect and communicate with others, as well as a debilitating sense of guilt over keeping his wife at a distance and longing for the company of other women. Loneliness and guilt are traits that define all the characters in this play, which include Ian's estranged girlfriend and baby mama, Neasa (Adrienne Gilg), and Laurence (Weston Smith), a young man working the streets of Dublin who makes his way to Ian's office. In short, Shining City is an intriguing character study masquerading as a one-act play.

As if to reinforce everyone's isolation and social dysfunction, none of the characters in this play have a home to call their own, all of them have sought out unsatisfying and shameful sexual encounters, and no more than two of them are on stage at any given time. And everyone speaks, to varying degrees, with fragmented, frequently self-interrupted half-thoughts laced with Harold Pinteresque pauses and David Mamet-like profanity. And like the actors in a Mamet or Pinter production, the ones assembled here must find the rhythms in the words, which, in turn, set the pace for this play.

Felkins nicely captures the immense weight of the sorrow his character bears, but the delivery of his sustained monologues, which are peppered with lamenting utterances of "you know," has no sense of immediacy, urgency, or musicality. Grimes, too, does a fine job of playing the anguished Ian and he pretty much nails the execution of those excruciating hesitations in his speech. But his fellow actors do him no favors by being late with their next line, which leaves Grimes hanging and the audience waiting.

Under Norman Blumensaadt's direction, everything during the opening night production was played a beat too slow, including the scene changes. These too-lengthy breaks in the action give patrons time to gather themselves between staged bouts of anguish, so the intended emotional distress we experience during one scene fails to carry over to the next or build by the time we reach the play's dramatic conclusion. As a result, Shining City comes across as a lesser work, which is not what McPherson had in mind.