Mary thinks John should visit John cannot imagine why anybody would ever want to see him. The play’s drama reaches its height in the middle scene, which features a visit to the funeral parlor from Mary (Sarah Street), John’s long-estranged daughter who has come to alert him that his wife is on her deathbed. Their conversations are fairly inane, but as in all of McPherson’s work, what they have to say is far less important than what they reveal about themselves by saying it: it becomes clear that John is desperate for companionship and terrified of being alone, where the whiskey bottle is never out of arm’s reach. Two of the play’s three scenes find John at the funeral home chatting with twenty-something Mark (Cillian Hegarty). The tortured soul in question here is John (Jeffrey Bean), a recovering alcoholic who works for a funeral director as he tries to make a life for himself after destroying the family from whom he is now estranged. O’Reilly restricts most of the action to a small, downstage table, giving these characters nowhere to hide and no excuse to avoid the challenging work of self-reflection that McPherson puts before them. On the theater’s small stage with a perfectly drab set by Charlie Corcoran, McPherson’s penetrating portrait of a shattered man becomes vivid and unmitigated. This common concern of McPherson’s is at the core of his 2000 play, Dublin Carol, now receiving a raw and unvarnished staging at the Irish Rep under the direction of Ciarán O’Reilly. What an awful, wrenching response to “I love you.” But in the world of Conor McPherson, such questions are very much the heart of the matter.įrom his earliest monologue plays on through some of his biggest successes like The Weir, Shining City, and The Seafarer, McPherson has concerned himself again and again with men who are not simply wounded and depressed, but utterly broken by their efforts to understand a world of goodness in which they see little space for themselves, who they cannot help but loath. Jeffrey Bean and Cillian Hegarty in Irish Rep’s DUBLIN CAROL.
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