The Seafarer returns, and Towers towers

The cast of The Seafarer. Production photos by Meghan Moore.

Within the last two years I've seen three productions of Conor McPherson's The Seafarer, so I'm beginning to feel like something of an expert on it. One of these was the author's own, which played like a bare-knuckled brawl between lost souls; what was startling about that version, and what I think has made the play so widely produced (along with McPherson's grimly lyrical monologues), was the surprise of its final sense of salvation, when those souls were revealed as not quite beyond hope after all. The script seemed far less potent, however, in a weak showing at SpeakEasy last fall; I blamed the gap largely on that production's superficiality and over-earnestness.

So I was glad to hear the Merrimack had taken it up again; that theatre's artistic director, Charles Towers, is certainly the most serious (and I'd argue the most talented) theatre-maker in town, and he does it old-school, without the props of "concept" or "updating" or what-have-you. With Towers, you know you'll get the play, without apology, and indeed with pride - because he knows that in the end, the play's the thing. And The Seafarer - probably the best new drama of the past few years - deserved a truly rich and resonant New England production.

But at first I was surprised to discover how far Towers had wandered from McPherson's own vision; this is a much darker and more ruminative version than I think the playwright imagined himself. It's also not flawless - the set feels slightly self-conscious, and I'd argue the director has made one major mistake in his casting. But damnit if Towers doesn't in the end work his familiar magic, and even perhaps surpasses the playwright in his vision of the play. This isn't merely the darkest Seafarer I've seen; it's also the deepest, and perhaps the best.

McPherson was inspired to pen the script by an Old English poem of the same name, which begins (in loose translation):

This tale is true, and mine.
It tells
How the sea took me, swept me back
And forth in sorrow and fear and pain;
Showed me suffering in a hundred ships,
In a thousand ports,
and in me.

In those lines one senses immediately a correspondence with McPherson's own voice; no wonder he was drawn to the arc of this lonely song (recorded in the Exeter Book, at left), that moves slowly but inexorably not toward man but toward God, and a final affirming Amen.

Of course (in case you've never encountered the play, or the playwright), McPherson's sea is one of alcohol, and his seafarers are all very hard cases, lurching drunkenly toward a defiantly "merry," but actually deeply desolate, Christmas Eve in a chilly rowhouse basement. Actually, there's a lone holdout among McPherson's revelers: Sharky, his lead, who is trying to keep the bottle at bay, as he has realized at last the mess it has made of his life. It's hard to be a teetotaler on Christmas, however, and harder still when not St. Nick but Old Nick himself shows up at your front door, in some dark Gaelic variation on A Christmas Carol.

Stranger still, Old Scratch has shown up equipped with a deck of cards, and a line about something Sharky promised him long ago, at yet another low point in the dark valley of his life; and by dawn the two are battling through a fateful game of poker, with our hero's immortal soul as the stakes. But on this simple, spooky premise McPherson has woven a skein of image and symbol that impresses me more every time I hear it. Is the Devil simply a living symbol for the bottle - or for the cold self-absorption that so often attends it? Or does Old Nick represent the long bill of reckoning that Sharky has been tallying his whole life? Fortunately, McPherson never settles on a single, simple metaphor to "explain" his set-up; instead, he allows his central situation to ramify into a complex meditation on temptation, and the inevitable loneliness of the fall from grace.

It's that sense of solitary descent that Towers captures with particular assurance and insight. His Sharky, David Adkins, registers with palpable pain every blow that circumstance delivers - he's lost his wife, his home, his last job, and even his car - just about everything but his blind, irascible brother, Richard (Gordon Joseph Weiss), whose angry brand of merriment is hardly a comfort. To be honest, the director doesn't quite capture the sodden sparks that Richard's bitter camaraderie, desparate as it may be, should send off. And he's made one obvious mistake in the casting of his drinking buddy, the hopelessly hapless Ivan. Played with the proper touch of looniness, the character brings a welcome touch of whimsy to the proceedings, but Towers has cast a "straight man" in the part - Jim Frangione, a likable but low-key journeyman who only brings Ivan partly to life (and only partly bothers with his accent, too).

This misstep is made up for by the rest of the cast, however. As the blind Richard (vision is another symbol woven subtly through the play), Gordon Joseph Weiss deploys the same crackling comic chops he displayed in last year's Moon for the Misbegotten, mixed this time with hints of a secret, rueful insight (my only caveat is that Richard should look far greasier than Weiss right now appears). Weiss was ably abetted by local stalwart Allyn Burrows, who I thought brought almost too much heft to the lightweight Nicky Giblin, the other Christmas visitor who's now bedding Sharky's wife; but I'm not sure I can really criticize an actor for bringing too much depth to a role! Especially when Mark Zeisler (at left, with Adkins) brought the same sense of solidity to Old Nick - here styling himself as "Mr. Lockhart," in a dark new suit and sleek camel hair coat. Zeisler was convincingly menacing, indeed at times ferocious, yet also drew real pathos from Lucifer's sense of his loss of God, and memorably essayed his heart-freezing vision of Hell. My only quibble with the performance was that I missed the strange sense of the alien that Ciaran Hinds brought to the role on Broadway; when Hinds gazed down at his arms and marveled at "this insect body," you got a sense that some very weird angel indeed had alighted onstage.

In the end what made the production special (and what makes the Merrimack so often so fine) was watching these performances click together, like so many gears, into a finely-tuned ensemble. This is one of the great joys of live theatre, and you simply don't see it much anymore, not at the deep level Towers produces; but I'd take it in a minute over a zillion booty calls or haunted houses at Harvard. By now, the Merrimack's track record is unparalleled locally - in just the last few years, they've produced A Delicate Balance, Skylight, Moon for the Misbegotten, and now The Seafarer, all of them close to masterpieces, and almost all directed by Towers, whose magic I admit is a bit mysterious, as he's certainly not the cleverest or most ingenious manager of stage business around. He simply seems to trust the quality of his material more than anybody else, and digs further than anybody else.

And anyone who has sat with an audience at Merrimack - a crowd that's usually quietly absorbed and attentive in a way you almost never see in Boston - understands immediately what the pay-off is for this kind of work. If only more of a pay-off were coming from the foundations and funds that are supposed to be supporting theatre but would rather be supporting trends and social work! Merrimack is actually doing fine financially - but only, of course, by carefully limiting the plays it does to small (or even single-person) casts. To be honest, however, Charles Towers is the local director who most deserves a wider canvas. If there's anyone local to whom we could entrust the classics, much less large-scale new works like The Coast of Utopia, it would be him. But will the powers-that-be ever wake up and realize that?

Christmas with the Devil

Billy Meleady battles his demons - literally - in The Seafarer. Photos by Mike Lovett.

My friend Art Hennessey and I sometimes ruminate on the problem of assessing the value of plays per se when we can only perceive them through the shifting screen of performance (and no, reading it to yourself in your study is no substitute for performance, all you armchair Shakespeareans). Pompous thing that I am, I like to imagine that I can sense the quality of a text "through" such vagaries - at least to some extent. And while I'm not about to abandon that position (do I ever abandon my positions?), the new SpeakEasy Stage production of Conor McPherson's The Seafarer (now through Dec. 13 at the BCA) does give me some new perspective on the problem.

First, some background. Last year I caught the New York premiere of McPherson's latest, under the direction of the author himself, with a cast which he had (mostly) brought with him from across the pond. The seasoned ensemble fit their roles just about perfectly, and the only actor I had qualms about - TV star David Morse, in the lead - always held up his end of the script, and managed to be quite gripping at its terrible climax. And in retrospect, it's clear that as director, McPherson perceived every weakness in his play - really his first fleshed-out, plot-driven drama - and disguised them well, punching up the action here or there, adding a song, and generally cutting against the material's depressing squalor with spry black humor.

Now perhaps it's unfair to compare a Broadway production to a Boston one - but then again, Scott Edmiston managed a re-thinking of Light in the Piazza that held up well to the New York original, so perhaps it isn't that unfair. And it must be admitted that much of the time, in the SpeakEasy version from director Carmel O'Reilly, The Seafarer is oft at sea, and only a shadow of its Broadway self. In short, this is one of the strongest plays SpeakEasy has done in years, yet it's one of their weaker productions.

True, some of the drama still works - not as devastatingly as it did on Broadway, mind you; but McPherson's spooky little fable about Christmas with the Devil has moments that are powerful enough to be director- and actor-proof, and at these climaxes for the most part O'Reilly stays out of the way. But elsewhere her lack of craft is evident as ever (she ran the ill-fated Súgán Theatre company, whose demise some people have blamed on my negative reviews). Once again, O'Reilly doesn't adequately block her scenes (but spreads her actors across the space at roughly 10-foot intervals), has little sense of pace or dramatic flow, and is generally so earnestly downbeat in her approach that it never occurs to her to cut against the surface of a play; one would never guess, for instance, from this gently dour version, at the wickedly antic tone McPherson brought to his foul first act.

Or maybe this is just a guy thing; maybe a woman could never perceive that alcoholism can be fun (although something tells me some women perceive that only too well!). But that cynical perception is key to The Seafarer - the lost souls drifting on a sea of spirits in McPherson's dingy flat are literally blind with drink, but they're that way because they enjoy it, and without that spark of pleasure the first act seems meandering and repetitious (because, perhaps, McPherson's dramaturgy is sometimes rather rough carpentry; prior to this he has written extended monologues). Only the central character, Sharky (Billy Meleady), is resisting the siren call of the bottle, and he's battling his demons with little support from his blinded brother Richard (Bob Colonna), or his nearly-daft neighbor Ivan (Larry Coen), who can only focus on scoring another wee drop as they slouch toward a particularly pathetic Christmas Eve.

But then a real demon shows up, in the person of Mr. Lockhart, a friendly chap who's stopped in for a card game. Only the suave stranger is hardly what he seems, and what's at stake in the last hand depends on a promise Sharky made long ago, in a prison cell - and the only thing he has to throw in the kitty this time is his mortal soul. It's a neat, time-tested set-up, and McPherson's sure touch somehow makes it all credible; the lights flicker once or twice, Mr. Lockhart hints at knowledge no human could possess, and we're suddenly transported back to the campfires of our youth, spellbound by tales of encounters with Old Nick. What gives this pitch fresh punch, of course, is its haunting resonance with Sharky's alcoholism, and his guilt at how it has ruined his life. He deserves to lose his soul - he's all but thrown it away anyhow - and he knows it. And Lockhart's vision of the cold loneliness of Hell is as utterly familiar to him as it is to anyone who's turned to the bottle for comfort (as McPherson, himself a former alcoholic, knows well).

It's these postcards from the afterlife, in fact, that make The Seafarer so memorable; soliloquy is McPherson's forte, and this time he's given the devil more than his due - Satan's evocation of not an inferno but a frozen waste, where the soul is confined forever in a space smaller than a coffin, may give you nightmares at least until Christmas. But what's most striking about this vision of the damned is its sense of desolate loss, its forlorn solitude. What makes Hell hell, Lockhart (or "locked-heart") insists, is that there's no one there to love you - just as there's no one to love the alcoholic - and we suddenly feel sympathy for the Devil when we perceive he feels nothing more keenly than his own loss of God. "Why does he love you, and not me?" he hisses, and his eternal hatred of all things human suddenly seems all too natural, and darkly tragic.

Or rather it would, except that director O'Reilly has made the mistake of casting her old colleague Derry Woodhouse as Lockhart; Mr. Woodhouse has his resources, but his essential gentleness is almost the polar opposite of what we expect from Old Scratch, and his (admittedly creepy) soft-spokenness makes him come off as a possible child molester, not a fallen angel. Compounding this problem is that as Sharky, the talented Billy Meleady (left, with Woodhouse) gives such a recessed performance that we never even guess at the springs of affection which could still redeem him from his fate. The rest of the cast is on firmer footing, although they can only support, not save, the play, and even here none of the performances had fully cohered by press night. As the blind and stingingly funny Richard, Bob Colonna gives probably the most satisfying performance, although he was hampered by memory problems and relied on a certain generically irascible attitude; still, I felt as his interpretation grew more lived-in and specific it could mature into something memorable. The reliable Larry Coen was likewise halfway there as the dazed, dorky Ivan; Coen understood the role, but hadn't yet spun it into the shambling piece of whimsy it has the potential to become. Meanwhile, as fifth wheel Nicky, Ciaran Crawford seemed competent and looked just right, but again hadn't begun to explore the feckless vanity of this seedy ladies' man.

The physical production was likewise slightly uninspired. Perhaps sensing the menace gap in the central role, sound designer Benjamin Emerson leaned heavily on the old whistling-wind sound effects, and lighting designer John Malinowski piled on the spooky lighting cues. J. Michael Griggs had a fairly good idea in suggesting Hell via a boarded-up, empty attic, but in spreading his set across the breadth of the Roberts Studio he inadvertently contributed to the show's lack of focus. Perhaps these all sound like small things. But I'm afraid with this play, the devil really is in the details.