A Dublin Carol – 2008
Image © Michael Brosilow
Chicago Theater Review – 24th November 2008
By Venus Zarris
Dublin Carol is a bittersweet memory play about a man whose life was almost completely ruined by drinking and the, still heavy, price he pays for his past. When his estranged daughter shows up on Christmas Eve, she offers him a slight chance at reconciliation.
Amy Morton directs a solid cast in a visually attractive yet austere production that gets everything right on the surface but shows little signs of much existing underneath the tight delivery of dialogue. Lines, interactions and reactions are effective but appear telegraphed. They are routed in the right direction and reach the appropriate emotional destinations but lack spontaneity.
It feels like the production is playing it safe. It feels like the goal is more to get through it without incident, rather than to create a fully realized reality that includes the sloppiness of unresolved conflict. The Irish accents are consistent but less than believable. Words like ’shite,’ instead of shit, and ‘paypal,’ instead of people, are given such unnatural emphasis that it sounds like AmerIrish. That is, Americans delivering Irish accents thereby loosing the lovely lyricism of the language.
William Petersen plays John, the mostly recovering alcoholic undertaker. This is a meaty role and Petersen renders it with skill but there is noticeable trepidation as if he doesn’t fully allow himself to immerse in the character. Stephen Louis Grush plays Mark, his young assistant. Grush is convincing and likeable.
Nicole Wiesner delivers the strongest performance as the beat down daughter, exhausted from her mother’s terminal illness and cautiously attempting connection with her charming but detached father. But it seems that her character is being held back as well.
Kevin Depinet’s scenic design beautifully creates the back room set to lived in and dated picture perfection.
When the primary action of the story exists in the past, we HAVE to believe the past is as tangible as the present but sadly there is no emotional evidence of a life before the dialogue begins. This could very well be a production that, like a good Irish whiskey, matures well with age. The opening performance seemed like a bit of a struggle but showed all of the signs of a potentially excellent offering once the actors get a little more comfortable in their parts. For now, Steppenwolf’s seasonal offering of Dublin Carol is interesting, but too subdued and dramatically light to be totally compelling and it illustrates that restraint sometimes needs to be restrained.
Scrooge on Booze
An alcoholic is forced to rethink his life in Dublin Carol
DUBLIN CAROL Steppenwolf Theatre Company
By Albert Williams
November 20, 2008
If ever a play deserved to be called sobering, Dublin Carol is it. Conor McPherson’s moving drama—receiving its Chicago premiere in a powerfully acted Steppenwolf production directed by Amy Morton—is a candid close-up of a man for whom every moment is a test: how many more nips of booze can he have before the demons take over and the bingeing begins?
The play, which debuted at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 2000, eschews the histrionics of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or The Boys in the Band, in which all-night drinking sessions fuel explosions of verbal and physical violence. Very little happens here. As in David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross—the work that inspired McPherson to become a playwright when he read it in college—the words are the action. What matters most is the emotional turmoil raging beneath its long confessional monologues and somber, sometimes salty storytelling.
The focus of the play is John Plunkett, a middle-aged undertaker’s assistant in present-day Dublin. It’s Christmas Eve, and John has just presided over a funeral. Since his employer is sick in the hospital, John has had to take charge of the business—not an easy thing for a guy who has problems handling responsibility—so he’s hired his boss’s 20-year-old nephew, Mark (Stephen Louis Grush), to lend a hand graveside. Returning to a shabby office tricked out with a few tacky holiday decorations, John offers Mark tea while pouring whiskey for himself. “I’m old. I’ll die if I don’t drink this,” he says jokingly.
But as the two men unwind, John’s rambling conversation turns serious, and the devastating role liquor has played in his life becomes increasingly obvious. Reflecting on the importance of his work (“You’re trying to afford people a bit of respect in their last little bit with their family”) he recalls how Mark’s uncle, significantly named Noel, saved his life by giving him a job when he was on the skids.
The information that John’s monologues convey is important, but so is their underlying purpose: as long as he can converse rationally with another person, he may be able to keep his demons at bay.
Later, John has another visitor—his daughter, Mary (Nicole Wiesner), now in her 30s, from whom John has been estranged since he abandoned his family years earlier. John’s encounter with Mary is more focused than his chat with Mark: she has come to persuade her father to visit his wife, who is dying of cancer. The thought of confronting his failed marriage dredges up more memories than John can face without liquid courage. As he and Mary trade recriminations and apologies, John again wanders perilously close to the abyss he describes with plainspoken eloquence: “Boredom. Loneliness. A feeling of basically being out of step with everybody else. Fear. Anxiety. Tension. And, of course, a disposition of generally liking the whole fucking thing of drinking till you pass out.”
McPherson wrote Dublin Carol when he was 28 and, by his own admission, an active alcoholic. Not till after he was hospitalized with a life-threatening case of pancreatitis did he sober up. So the play offers an informed perspective on what drives John to drink: low self-esteem and a sense of guilt, the search for short-term highs to cure a long-term depression.
A show this dark might be a hard sell at the box office without a name actor. The Steppenwolf staging has one: William Petersen of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, making his first onstage appearance here in ten years. The young actor-athlete—remembered for viscerally exciting performances in such productions as In the Belly of the Beast, The Tooth of Crime, and Once in Doubt—has become a jowly graybeard, but lost none of his chops. Petersen’s deep connection to the text and compact, economic movement perfectly convey a man whose cautious demeanor hides an endless inner struggle.
Dublin Carol is hardly a cheerful way to kick off the winter holidays. But it’s a brave and appropriate offering for a season whose emphasis on festivities and family reunions can trigger depression, painful revelations, and alcohol abuse. As the title suggests, it owes something to Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Both works are about a lonely man trapped in a psychological prison of his own making. Like Ebenezer Scrooge, John receives Christmas visitors who force him to review his life and his relationships to those around him. Mark, who is wrestling with his commitment to his girlfriend, reminds John of his own idealistic, callow younger self; Mary, torn between love and hate for her father, represents all he has lost. But Dublin Carol ends before John has to confront what Scrooge finally faces—the terror of death, in the form of the dying wife his daughter wants him to visit. Will John be able to make the final courageous gesture that might put his anguish to rest? McPherson leaves us uncertain but hopeful.
Time Out Magazine – Dublin Carol
Steppenwolf Theatre Company. By Conor McPherson. Dir. Amy Morton. With William Petersen, Nicole Wiesner, Stephen Louis Grush.
Among Conor McPherson’s dark plays that make you nearly want to kill yourself—an anthology known colloquially as “the Conor McPherson plays”—there exists a shared ethereal quality that inspires producers to keep mounting them and audiences returning for more. His plays, such as The Weir and Shining City, rarely feature more than haunted characters telling their stories in an attempt to parse through their demons. Yet the ceaselessly bleak Irish dramatist composes underscores that don’t just hum beneath the surface. They linger in your head after the curtain call.
Dublin Carol, now in a tidy, conservative and affecting Steppenwolf production, is no exception. Petersen plays John, a perpetually if casually drunk funeral director who’s kept his life low maintenance by abandoning his wife and kids and anesthetizing his soul on a slow bourbon drip. When his adult daughter (Wiesner) shows up with the news that his dying, cancer-ridden wife would like him to handle her funeral, he’s forced to pay the emotional piper.
Directed by actor Amy Morton, apparently on a very productive lunch break between the Broadway and London productions of August: Osage County, Dublin boasts none of the spiritual uplift one might expect from a show whose title invokes the rare happy Dickens story (and McPherson’s forced Scrooge analogy doesn’t work anyway). But at its heart it has the crackling warmth of a winter hearth.
McPherson’s heavily narrative plays could be as effectively experienced over the radio as viewed for $70 a seat, but Morton has gotten Kevin Depinet to design the handsomest set yet seen in the proscenium renovation of Steppenwolf’s upstairs space. The supporting work of Grush as John’s young layabout assistant and especially the quietly weathered Wiesner is unsurprisingly expert. But most audiences are surely interested in CSI’s Petersen. Though I’m neither old enough to remember his storied North Side storefront work dating back to the ’70s nor free enough from live theater on Thursdays to appreciate his television work, seeing his humble self-containment and deft nuance in a non-showboat role helps me understand why his presence causes local frenzy.
— Christopher Piatt
The Examiner – Quiet joy to the world seeps through sadness in ‘A Dublin Carol’
by Catey Sullivan
Soaked in the cold, illusory comfort of whiskey, set in the seedy backroom of a Dublin funeral home, and centering on a trio of lonesome, exhausted souls “A Dublin Carol” doesn’t seem like an apt candidate for the feel-good hit of the holiday season. And yet the Steppenwolf Theatre production it very well could be. There is a gleam of unmistakable, unshakable hope in Conor McPherson’s gently mesmerizing meditation on spirits of both the life-erasing liquid variety and the angelic sort that perch as unseen, guardians in places that seem all but abandoned.
Consider the bleak pronouncement John (Bill Petersen – yes, that Bill Petersen) makes as he downs yet another shot after burying a drug addict on Christmas Eve: “Christmas is not just another morning, only there’s a star in the f*cking’ East,” he notes mordantly. And indeed, everything in John’s life seems to indicate just that. But like the Dickens classic it so brilliantly riffs on, “Dublin Carol” is, in the end, a testimony to redemption.
Directed with subtle passion and insight by Amy Morton for the Steppenwolf, the three-person cast of McPherson’s gently surprising and wickedly funny drama delivers a story that’s both utterly unremarkable and profound. This holiday world you never multi-plex holiday rom coms or in the catalogue photo spreads featuring rosy-cheeked families sipping hot chocolate in cozy ski togs.
McPherson gives us the world between the cracks, a terrifying and terrifyingly ordinary place where the shattered people wander, cold and forgotten. Or, almost forgotten. As he did in the glorious “The Seafarer” (also running at the Steppenwolf), McPherson – with that pitch black of humor you can only find in a land where make-you-blind and impotent Poteen Whiskey serves as a primary good group –offers a glowing ray hope piercing through the darkest shadows.
The darkness is as mundane as it is harrowing. John’s a drunk, one of millions. Yet calling John an alcoholic is like calling Leonardo Da Vinci a weekend tinkerer. When it comes to the downing shots and drowning sorrows, John is in that rarefied, bottomless-bottle hell reserved for those who want to die but lack the initiative. Instead of pulling the trigger or breaking out the razors, they trudge daily into purgatory, isolated from the living and unable to join the dead. One of the piece’s high (and most hilarious) points comes as John describes the predictable nature of his benders. Petersen nails it, describing a cycle worse than the Stations of the Cross and with none of the benefits. This isn’t partying. It’s drinking to the point that you’d take a claw hammer to your skull just to achieve the mercy of a blackout. And as the stage veteran turned TV star delivers it, the monologue is one of the funniest you’ll hear this side of “The Santaland Diaries.”
On this particular Christmas Eve, John has two visitors: Mark (Stephen Louis Grush) is a young assistant undertaker with troubles of his own. Mary (Nicole Wiesner, a luminous Madonna radiating sorrow and love) is a young woman who shows up with news that forces John to survey the blasted wreckage of his life.
All three are painfully, obviously separated from any real human connection. It’s no coincidence that a pub called “Major Tom’s” (as in “Your circuit’s dead, there’s something wrong” from David Bowie’s classic “Space Odyssey”) comes up in the dialogue.But McPherson doesn’t send these three lovely, broken people into oblivion alone. Instead, he subtly, quietly imbues them with just enough hope to hang on.There’s no hallelujah chorus, no pageantry, no trumpets proclaiming joy to the world. But the joy is there nonetheless, a gift from the playwright, and Steppenwolf’s gifted artists.
New City Stage Review – Dublin Carol
In the vast pantheon of Christmas theater, “Dublin Carol” is unique first and foremost because it is a play powerful and eloquent enough be performed outside of the holiday season. Yes, every minute takes place on Christmas Eve, but Irish playwright Conor McPhearson’s 2000 booze-soaked retrograde riff on “A Christmas Carol” might well be called “Anatomy of an Alcoholic,” so powerfully does it give its audience a phenomenology of what the ravages of alcoholism do to an individual as well as all those around him or her.
We have all been on the receiving end of the endless boozy broadcasts that veteran Chicago actor turned “CSI” television star William Petersen as John relentlessly and convincingly gives in “Carol.” As he is boring and alienating his 20-year-old assistant Mark (Stephen Louis Grush) to death, he tells Mark about a bartender who had “a good listening quality” and adds, “You have it, too.” Sure. It’s called being held hostage. Booze tends to clog up receivers, i.e., the ability to listen and respond to others and their needs, but often does wonders for broadcasting a wealth of useless information that sounds like wisdom under the influence but like the crap it usually is to those who are sober. And yet, every now and then, some truths cut so deeply that even the effects of the bottle cannot fully numb them.
The “redemptive” moment, if you want to call it that, is an unexpected visit from John’s daughter (Nicole Wiesner) that he hasn’t seen in ten years, coming to courageously ask him to come visit her mother and his estranged wife, who is dying of cancer. After an endless self-absorbed checklist of sins of commission and omission and a powerful confession of squandered attempts to get his life back together along the way, his daughter asks if he had to do things all over again, would he do things differently? In an inverted “It’s A Wonderful Life” response, John tells her that he just wishes it had all just “never happened.” “Do you wish I had never happened?” she voices, to no response. It’s one of those moments that you hope will imitate art when it happens in real life, but most often, doesn’t. His silence speaks volumes that she of course, can interpret as a lack of love for her personally, but the reality is that this is a man that hasn’t been able to love himself nor feel much else in decades, and to make matters worse, admits as much, drunk or sober.
Aside from one of the most eloquent monologues on the manic hell of alcoholism from the inside out (McPhearson has made his struggle public and, curiously, his more recent “on the wagon” plays are less monologue-like and feature more character interaction and narrative than his earlier soliloquy-filled “off the wagon” plays) perhaps the most fascinating aspect of “Dublin Carol” is that it does not reach for the formulaic finale of most Yuletide yarns. Exactly what happens to John, who already has ignored his daughter’s plea not to drink before coming to the hospital, is never fully revealed under Steppenwolf ensemble member Amy Morton’s direction (her first Steppenwolf project back home since her Tony Award-nominated Broadway role in “August: Osage County” although she’s set to open the same role in London this week), though fascinatingly, audience members coming out of the opening were sure that it had. Does he go, or does he sit around continuing to soak himself in denial and self-pity? There are strong staging hints in both directions, to be sure, but we are left in the ambiguity that a world anesthetized by alcohol tends to approximate. (Dennis Polkow)
Chicago Critic Review – Dublin Carol
Just in case you’re getting too much sweet cheer and good will from all those Christmas plays, get to Steppenwolf Theatre to see Chicago legend and TV star William Petersen speak about the loneliness of the addicted drinker. Playwright Conor McPherson, today’s leading Irish playwright, sure knows about alcoholism himself being a victim. He paints a dismal portrait of a life ruined by the drink. William Petersen deftly delivers several monologues about the devastating physical and social and psychological effects of spending one’s life drunk. This is a riveting work with extremely powerful performances from Petersen, Nicole Wiesner and Stephen Louis Grush.
Set in contemporary Dublin, Ireland, “Dublin Carol” finds a middle aged John (William Petersen) in his back office (terrific set design by Kevin Depinet) at the funeral home he works at as a funeral director. His new assistant is twenty year-old Mark (Stephen Louis Grush) who stops by after the two finished a funeral. It is Christmas Eve. John insists Mark has tea; John nips at his bottle. Mark is a polite listener as John tells his story about how he became a funeral director. He spouts his personal philosophy of life in a richly colored speech that vividly describes the pitfalls of getting to like the drink too much. McPherson mixes self-deprecating humor with the pains of being perpetually drunk. Petersen is quite believable as the wounded, lonely drunk lamenting his choice of the drink over his family. He acknowledges his gratitude to the mortician for giving him a job when he was down and out. Mark listens politely to John’s cautionary tale. Mark departs.
John arrives back to his office after buying another bottle to find Mary (Nicole Wiesner), his estranged daughter. Neither has seen one another in ten years. After several uncomfortable moments, we learn that Mary has come to inform her dad that his wife (Mary’s mother) is dying of cancer in a hospital. The two exchanges their life stories through long and riveting emotional and richly textured speeches that vividly dramatize how drank can both destroy a man and his family. If I had a teen, I’d get them to see this show just to hear these exchanges so maybe alcohol won’t be so enticing to them.
These painfully honest confessions by John and Mary are exquisitely performed by Petersen and the terrific Wiesner. We see how Mary presents to John a chance to escape the pain and guilt of the past by doing the right thing now. Will John lift the burden of his past? This powerful show will knock you sober as it drives home how loneliness and solitude are the most painful effects of alcoholism. John advises Mark to select intimacy with his girl over the isolation of the drink. The truthfulness of this marvelously acted play looms large. “Dublin Carol” presents an important message. You’ll be riveted to your seat for 85 minutes.
Stead Style Chicago Review – Dublin Carol
William Petersen has barely spoken five lines of dialogue before he has a pint in his hand. An Irish play you ask, what tipped you off? Judging from “The Weir” and “Dublin Carol,” Conor McPherson may be the most over-rated playwright to achieve success this side of the Emerald Isle. It’s not just that McPherson at times sounds like a second-rate David Mamet. We all know the Irish have the gift of gab. But talk is cheap in the theatre when we don’t have an interesting plot or characters with which to empathize.
In “Dublin Carol,” Petersen plays a middle-aged funeral assistant whose life has been mostly consumed by liquor, guilt and self-loathing. Twenty-five years ago, John left his wife, daughter and son for a love affair with the bottle. The owner of the funeral business, Noel befriended him, gave him a job and a fresh start. And now that Noel has been hospitalized and his 20-year-old nephew Mark is poised to step in as a new apprentice of sort, John is forced to confront the demons that still haunt him. His estranged wife is now dying of cancer, his daughter Mary hasn’t seen her father in ten years, and she’s come to ask him to conduct the funeral once her mother passes.
Funerals, John explains to Mark, are for those left behind. Bereavement and respect are of no use to the deceased, “If you haven’t earned it when you’re alive, don’t look for it after you’re dead.” John vows that when it’s his time, “I’d want it over as quick as possible.” And while he takes his profession seriously, he can’t bring himself to see let alone bury his own wife. Mary wonders what he would do differently if given a chance, but John barely seems cognizant of his actions and completely unwilling to alter his destiny. “I’m in a fog,” he says. Love is dangerous and unconditional love is the worst blow.
It’s always nice to see a successful film or television star return to their stage roots, not only for the potential marquee value but to practice their craft in a meaningful forum before a live audience. Sad to report, Steppenwolf’s “Dublin Carol” is a disappointing showcase for Petersen’s talents. He has the richest and best developed of the play’s three roles, and there’s a quiet, workmanlike proficiency to his acting. Unfortunately, it never crosses into something powerful or emotionally grabbing. The sense of irreparable despair and self-induced loathing feel pretty shallow, and Petersen’s slightly hesitant delivery never feels properly grounded or believable.
The same cannot be said of the intense Nicole Wiesner, who wordlessly shows layers of pain and betrayal. Wiesner is a stunning actress who makes her role of Mary quietly moving and endlessly sympathetic. Stephen Louis Grush completes the trio in a roughly sketched role as young Mark, who functions as little more than a sounding board for Petersen’s John. We see a man battling an army of demons – boredom, loneliness, guilt and fear of being judged by others. Rather than atone for his mistakes in life, learn from his hurtles or change course and find some kind of redemption, John’s solution is to drink more. It’s a kind of dramaturgical laziness that’s not helped by Director Amy Morton’s uninspired production. The best thing to be said for this Steppenwolf “special engagement” is the marvelously detailed and evocative setting by Kevin Depinet.
SUNTIMES : HEDY WEISS
Examining an aging drunk’s DNA
Whether set in a rural pub, a vintage urban office or a dimly lit traditional bungalow, the plays of Conor McPherson (“The Weir,” “Shining City” and “The Seafarer” among them) share certain unmistakable qualities.
Most crucially, McPherson’s mode of storytelling — which more often than not is set into motion by the consumption of significant quantities of alcohol — suggests both a church confessional and an analytic session on the couch. In addition, this 37-year-old Irish playwright’s storytellers invariably are haunted by their pasts, obsessed by guilt and ghosts, and weighed down by a certain sense of failure. Though still painfully alert to their emotions, and keenly aware of the way they have screwed up their lives — disappointing those they’ve loved and been loved by — their connection to this world seems almost beside the point. On some level they seem to be more keenly tuned in to a vision of the next world, or at least to the peace it might bring.
The gemlike, 80-minute “Dublin Carol,” first produced in 2000 and now being performed in Steppenwolf’s Upstairs Theatre, is an ideal example of all McPherson’s preoccupations. And, under the pitch-perfect direction of Amy Morton, its three vivid actors — William Petersen, Stephen Louis Grush and Nicole Wiesner — it assumes echoes of the quiet radiance and ache of another great Irish playwright, Samuel Beckett.
It is Christmas Eve, and death is in the air, with designer Kevin Depinet’s authentically timeworn set and the darkly cozy lighting of Robert Christen setting the mood.
John (Petersen), is a lonely, aging alcoholic who works as an undertaker, and who luckily has found a sensitive young assistant in 20-year-old Mark (Grush). Mark’s uncle, Noel, saved John when he was at rock bottom in his drinking habit, and now that empathetic man is in a hospital, perhaps close to death.
Meanwhile, returning to see him after 10 years of estrangement is John’s daughter, Mary (Wiesner), a mournful young woman who admits her own life isn’t what she’d hoped it would be. She comes bearing news that her mother — the woman John abandoned years earlier in one of his drunken stupors — is now dying, and wants him to pay her a visit. Mary also hints at the damage John’s absence has caused in her brother’s life.
The big unanswered question here is whether or not John will make the visit to the hospital — whether he is psychologically capable of unearthing that great scar on his past.
Petersen’s beautiful performance as the most ambivalent of men is at once filled with vitality and a certain inner resignation, and this creates the perfect tension. After his nearly decadelong run on the small screen with “CSI,” it is great to have this actor back on a stage, and he brings to his portrayal of a compulsively selfish and self-judging man a whole new subtlety and depth.
Wiesner, with her strong beauty and ferocious intensity, winningly captures Mary’s love-hate relationship with her father. It is a performance of enormous maturity that leaves its mark long after she has closed the door of his apartment. And Grush turns in an exquisite portrait as Mark, capturing the awkwardness of a young man at a romantic crossroad — one who might just take a better path in life, or perhaps not.
CHICAGO TRIBUNE : CHRIS JONES
Steppenwolf’s “A Dublin Carol”; Death, Drink and William Petersen
THEATER REVIEW: “Dublin Carol” ★ ★ ★ Through Dec. 28 at Steppenwolf Theatre Company, 1635 N. Halsted St.; Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes; Tickets: $50-70 at 312-335-1650. Nicole Wiesner is Mary and William Petersen is John in Conor McPherson’s “Dublin Carol,” directed by Steppenwolf ensemble member Amy Morton.
At this weekend’s opening of Conor McPherson’s anti-festive drama “Dublin Carol,” three colossal entities battled for domination of the Steppenwolf stage. Death. Drink. And William Petersen. Because Petersen is probably the most interesting of the trio, I’ll take ’em in reverse order.
Petersen, the star of “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” hadn’t been onstage for long Saturday night before a woman’s voice rang from a neighboring row. “He looks like a completely different person,” she said, as Petersen essayed McPherson’s melancholy, alcoholic undertaker. One had to resist the urge to rise pretentiously from one’s seat, screaming, “That’s because he’s an actor.”
But the voice reflected a new reality. To many of us, Petersen is a distinguished Chicago actor who went away to do some TV. But he’s now a bona fide star making a two-show deal with Chicago theater. (His second outing will be in “Blackbird” at Victory Gardens next year.) It marks an impressive commitment—one frequently promised by other breakout stars of our theater, but rarely fulfilled. But I think its creative sting will be in its second half.
Petersen is an actor of great integrity and skill who has only deepened with age. And I should note here that the 75-minute, three-character “Dublin Carol” is a play of quiet desperation, a dawning awareness of the horrors of life and agonizing self-doubt, not some roaring tour de force of an enraged alcoholic, a la Tracy Letts.
Petersen knows his way around truth and shows us plenty here. But he works in a relatively narrow comfort zone. This is a controlled performance. It is carefully nuanced. It is honest. It teeters on the brink of extensive emotional engagement. But it is insufficiently expansive and theatrical. It needs at least the empty attempt at an existential howl. Petersen should let loose a little and chase off the demons at the rear of the theater.
And so to the drink. As I’ve said in print before, I think McPherson is far and away the most compelling of the living Irish playwrights. When it comes to understanding the thick trajectory of booze through Anglo-Irish culture, I think he gets it better than all the dead ones too.
“Dublin Carol” is a play about a lifelong drinker surveying the wreckage of his life. It’s not the Titanic—just a lost, now-sick wife (who remains unseen) and a sad-eyed daughter (played with beautiful restraint in Amy Morton’s simple production by the terrific Nicole Wiesner). He still has a few wise things to say to a young fellow (played by the honest young actor Stephen Louis Grush) who helps out in his office. But drink has taken a lot away. It has begun to threaten his life.
For what happens next to such a man as he on the following Christmas Eve, you’ll have to see (and don’t even think about missing it) “The Seafarer,” McPherson’s dramatic masterpiece, at Steppenwolf later this season. If you don’t put the bottle down, the devil shows up and takes over.
But in this shorter, earlier play, death is already a-calling. McPherson told me last Christmas that death is the only thing worth writing about, or going to the theater to hear about and I mostly concur. Just as the brilliant HBO series “Six Feet Under” could endlessly milk the absurdity of our trying to civilize the most horrific kinds of deaths, so McPherson here, more simply, presents us with an office of death decorated by a sad little tree and a man who drinks to live.
You don’t find yourself blaming him. This play articulates what it feels like to be a drinker. And lonely. And cold. And on the outside. And worried about where you went wrong.
Go see Part 1 of the McPherson fest. You gotta stare down the dark side of Christmas to feel, really feel, any of the good. And here you will find a fine Chicago actor, in the process of returning home to work.
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