‘Seafarer’ is a dark holiday tale
If you find yourself playing poker with the devil, it’s best not to let him shuffle. This particular word to the wise would be lost on the characters of Conor McPherson’s dark yuletide drama “The Seafarer,” a menagerie of drunk Irishmen so vociferously wrapped up in their own sorry affairs that they fail to recognize the evil in their midst.
The New Phoenix Theatre’s production of the show, which opened Thursday, lives up to the quirky, darkly humorous and self-consciously overwrought tones of McPherson’s script. It features three full-fledged and two borderline alcoholics as they prepare, in their own expletive-and Jameson-soaked way, to celebrate the passing of yet another depressing excuse for a holiday.
One of the group, the well-dressed and immediately eyebrow-raising Mr. Lockheart (Christian Brandjes), is out for more than a little holiday-fueled mirth and camaraderie. This becomes evident shortly into the first act and proceeds to hang over the rest of the play like an anvil. McPherson knows how eagerly his audience will wait for it to drop, and he has a lot of fun stretching those anticipations in all sorts of sumptuous directions.
Unlike that other collection of tortured Irish souls currently on display in the Irish Classical Theatre’s production of the heavy-handed play “The Cavalcaders,” McPherson’s crew is infinitely entertaining, even while having something vaguely uplifting to say — if only just barely — about human nature.
The comic center of the play is a blind, unwashed drunk named Richard (Tom Makar), given to dressing down his brother and caretaker Sharky (Richard Lambert) in the most demoralizing ways. He sits in his orange armchair, stinking up the small apartment that he shares with Sharky and issuing an endless stream of demands, each more vitriolic than the last.
He calls Sharky “a curmudgeonly old bollocks” and “an awful useless . . . idiot,” among other, less printable things, and the irony there is that he may as accurately be describing himself. Makar does a good job with the character, uttering alternately detestable and apologetic pronouncements that have the audience roaring. To put it in the words of one amused playgoer at intermission: “Doesn’t he just look so bad you could smell him? Even though he probably doesn’t smell?” In any other context that would be an insult, but here, it’s high praise.
As Sharky, the focus of Mr. Lockheart’s unholy attentions, Richard Lambert’s performance is understated but strong, constantly exuding the spirit of someone longing to do the right thing but assailed by — and here’s where McPherson’s embrace of the overly literal comes in — his own demons. Brandjes’ Mr. Lockhart is just the right balance of fire and brimstone and feigned compassion. As the superfluous but endlessly entertaining drunk Ivan Curry, Dan Walker lightens things up considerably.
McPherson’s piece is like a supernatural Irish version of David Rabe’s “Hurlyburly,” full of bluster and invective but conspicuously devoid of a coherent message. But in its soul, there’s something deeply appealing about these tragic drunks, who manage to inadvertently cast off evil with a certain boozy optimism.
Franklin LaVoie’s set design is just dingy enough to look like a completely authentic dilapidated Irish bachelor’s pad, and Makar’s sound design — apart from the near-constant and somewhat distracting sound effect of wind howling outside — is light where it needs to be and appropriately dark the rest of the time.
If it’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” you’re after, this might be one for you and the kids to skip. But as adult holiday dramas go, they don’t get much more darkly entertaining than “The Seafarer.”
Theater Review
“The Seafarer”
★★★
Drama presented through Dec. 13 in New Phoenix Theatre on the Park, 95 N. Johnson Park. For more information, call 853-1334 or visit www.newphoenixtheatre.com. .
