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Human lights
Súgán illuminates The Sanctuary Lamp
BY CAROLYN CLAY
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The title object of The Sanctuary Lamp, dangling from its gilt setting in an Irish Catholic church, is less beacon than punching bag in Tom Murphy’s harsh 1975 contemplation of religion as bankrupt balm. When the play debuted at the famed Abbey Theatre, audiences got hotter under the collar than they had since The Plough and the Stars, but given the scandal and disillusion that have since hit the Catholic Church, probably not even those arts rowdies at the Abbey would get lit off by The Sanctuary Lamp today. Yet the play, by the 69-year-old dramatist some consider Ireland’s greatest living playwright, has seen little life outside its native land (where the Abbey mounted it in a revised version in 1985 and again as part of a 2001 Murphy retrospective). It did not have its English premiere until 2003, and the shadowy, eruptive Súgán Theatre Company staging is only its second production in America. With its gathering of two circus performers manqué and a bereft teen who hold a slumber party in a church (bedding down in an upturned wooden confessional), The Sanctuary Lamp is a curious work. But like the suspended candle standing in for the presence of the Divine, it should not be quenched. In the end, the work justifies its existence in the sweet, loopy alternatives it presents to Church-mandated Life Everlasting. Grieving strongman Harry pictures a billowy stacking of soul silhouettes at the edge of the universe to form a "true union of loved ones." Failed juggler Francisco sees Limbo — preferable, he opines, to severe Heaven — as a sort of tropical jungle inhabited by fat, gurgling babies eating bananas: salvation as a rugrats’ vacation in paradise. Yet The Sanctuary Lamp, bleak, angry, and eccentric, is a strange enough work that even Súgán artistic director Carmel O’Reilly, who had previously tackled Murphy’s Famine, The Gigli Concert, and Bailegangaire, circled the play for several years before committing. Now the scrappy Súgán troupe, which has been dispensing and dispelling Irish myth for 13 years, moves into larger, fancier quarters in the Roberts Studio Theatre in the Calderwood Pavilion with the seldom-seen play. And though a slow starter, Murphy’s long night’s journey for spiritual refugees grows increasingly compelling in the second act, which introduces the play’s only Irish character, edgy friend and betrayer Francisco, played here by Aidan Parkinson with a barking anger and a tight lilt that make a curled-lipped animal cry of his frequent, taunting address of Harry as "Haarr." There is heaving yet graceful work by Nigel Gore as Harry, a Jew who wanders into the dark church burdened by murderous urges and seeking he-knows-not-what. And Stacy Fisher brings skittish poignancy to the lyrical shorthand of Maudie, who’s looking for forgiveness, possibly from the paintings of Jesus. But it’s when Parkinson takes over, with his biting if ominous tale of a circus performance gone awry, delivered like so much brimstone from the protective height of the pulpit, that The Sanctuary Lamp truly shines. The beginning of the play finds down-and-out Harry sitting in the single pew of J. Michael Griggs’s skeletal church, whose only ornament is the gold-and-red sanctuary lamp. Without quite knowing how to articulate the questions that disturb him, he interrupts a kindly monsignor (Jackson Royal) reading Herman Hesse. And before you know it, Harry’s been made "clerk," given a cassock, and told to keep the lamp lit while the monsignor goes home to peruse his book in comfort. For Harry, who has seen his circus career crash, his wife take up with best friend Francisco, and his infant daughter die, the church is less spiritual home than halfway house — with the silent lamp as counselor/confessor. His recap of an embittered life is, however, interrupted by teenage squatter Maudie, who gobbles crumbs of proffered fruitcake while huddled in borrowed priestly vestments. When Francisco turns up, the three share altar wine and sad tales and Harry and Francisco circle old hostilities until the flickering comfort of a new faith — one centered on "Jesus, man" and not on some bleeding emissary of an abandoning God — emerges. The Sanctuary Lamp is talky but also Beckettesque, its blasphemies stemming from human need rather than disrespect for a Church on disconnect. Neither is the play, with its implication that facing the inner demons as well as the Divine absence connotes faith, as dour as it sounds. Quoted by Philip O’Leary in an essay in the program, Murphy remarks that the play’s title symbol "hasn’t anything to do with religion. It’s the campfire in the distance, the candle in the window and the proof of hope in man." Sounds more like Tinker Bell than Lucifer.
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