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Mourning after
Nora hums McPherson’s Dublin Carol
BY CAROLYN CLAY
Dublin Carol
By Conor McPherson. Directed by Janet Morrison. Set by Eric Levenson. Costumes by Jacqueline Dalley. Lighting and sound by David Wilson. With Bryce Pinkham, Richard McElvain, and Devon Jencks. Presented by Nora Theatre Company at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre through October 5.


The holiday cheer in Dublin Carol is strictly of the 80-proof kind. Otherwise it’s recrimination — and self-recrimination — cocktails all around in Irish playwright Conor McPherson’s 2000 take on Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, a dark day of the soul in which deputy undertaker John Plunkett washes down old guilt and old sorrows before giving his hangdog face a possibly redemptive splash. This is no full-scale conversion drama, with the mean-spirited liver of a parched life waking from a whirlwind spiritual tour to give away turkeys. But McPherson, the author of such lyrical, tale-telling works as St. Nicholas and The Weir, does chase 90 minutes of Jameson’s and confession with a wee tumbler of salvation.

Dublin Carol reopened London’s Royal Court Theatre in 2000 after the place had been shuttered for renovations; it had its New York premiere last February from Atlantic Theater Company. The play takes the form of three short scenes set in a Dublin undertaker’s office on Christmas Eve day. In the first, the garrulous if more desperate than convivial John chats up and shares some history with a young assistant, the nephew of the now-ailing mortician whom John credits with having saved him from the vicious cycle of drunkenness during which he abandoned his family and generally made a mess of his life. In the second, John’s long-estranged daughter shows up to tell him that the wife he left so long ago is dying of cancer and wants to see him. Tightly wound with stale heartbreak, the encounter is alternately strained, wistful, and anguished, and it triggers the final scene, in which John once again regales the assistant, offering almost fatherly advice regarding the maltreatment of women and burrowing deeper into his own painful history of a life debilitated by drink, then stabilized into a sort of limbo of moderate guzzling and the nine-to-five in the death biz.

Dublin Carol lacks the mesmerizing quality of McPherson’s more colorful tale of a downward spiral, the monologue for undone theater critic and vampires’ pimp St. Nicholas; and neither does it weave the same spell as his series of ghost stories thrown forth in a rural Irish pub, The Weir. Rather, it moves in fits and starts, feathered staccato exchanges giving way to arias, mostly for the defensively apologetic John, of angry despair. McPherson, who at 32 has already passed his drunken years, has said that the play is "about fear"; John has used alcohol to chase the tail of his own cowardice, which is somehow tied to Irish Catholicism and a boyhood of feeling "shit scared." But the play, like all of McPherson’s, is also about the redemptive power of storytelling; having told his tale, John is in a way purged of it, like Jim Tyrone in A Moon for the Misbegotten.

The Nora production of the play, its New England premiere, wields the area’s main McPherson weapon, actor Richard McElvain, whose sonorous turns in Súgán Theatre Company’s St. Nicholas and New Repertory Theatre’s The Weir contributed mightily to the success of those productions. Here McElvain, his nondescript John a sort of Walter Mitty playing Jim Tyrone, sustains a shorter musical line, peppering the character’s shameful reminiscences with nervous, dismissive little fffts and whinnies. It’s a disarming performance in its combination of small-time dapperness and pain, exposing a man confronting not only the specter but also the present reality of what he believes to be his own meanness. But on opening afternoon, it didn’t feel quite jelled.

The whole production, in fact, felt on the way to achieving its full force. (It didn’t help that a coat tree intended to be toppled by a drunken John in part three went down twice in part one.) Director Janet Morrison, who’s head of the graduate acting program at Brandeis, seems to be aiming for both a fable-like quality (there’s a magic effect at the end) and a lonely uneasiness in the relationships. Sometimes, however, it was the actors rather than the characters who seemed awkward with each other. Certainly Devon Jencks captures the mix of volatile, righteous anger and little-girl-lost in daughter Mary. And gangly Bryce Pinkham is suitably deferential as the boss’s nephew, who’s new to the grim business of carrying wreaths and, as John says, "excuse the pun, but generally looking grave." McPherson’s cadences, as always, are lyrical, and McElvain makes whole segments sing. But all three actors have some problems making the vivid, colloquial language understood. At least in its first weekend, Dublin Carol still needed a little fine tuning.


Issue Date: September 26 - October 2, 2003
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