'Tis the season. In the next few weeks, troupes all over the region will be rolling out their annual Christmas Carols and Nutcrackers. In Hartford, TheaterWorks is getting a jump on them all with The Seafarer, an unlikely bowl of Yuletide wassail from the most celebrated of the new generation of Irish playwrights, Conor McPherson.
There's no sugarplum Santaland or nostalgic Victoriana here. This one carols in a shabby house in a shabby present-day Dublin suburb. The halls are decked with beer cans, empty whiskey bottles and, in Adrian Jones' suitably dingy set, a pathetic plastic Christmas tree. And on this night before Christmas, the stranger who comes visiting isn't Saint Nick, but Old Nick.
The object of devilish interest is a man called Sharky. He has been beaten down by life and recently beaten up by hooligans. His weathered face is bruised and band-aided, and in Dean Nolen's affecting performance we see all the man's pissed-off soul-weariness. He's haunted by a mortal sin he committed many years ago. He escaped punishment then by making a deal with the Devil. Literally. And now the Devil wants his due.
Sharky has been a scrapper and a drifter, his life chances ruined by temper and drink. Now, trying to go sober, he has come home to look after his equally hard-drinking older brother, Richard, who recently lost his sight in a run-in with a dumpster.
You get the feeling Richard has always been a bit hapless, so going blind just gives him more excuse to be a demanding, dependent pain in the ass. Richard is at once the play's most outrageous and most pathetic figure, and Edmond Genest gives the production's most entertaining and poignant performance, with a kind of sweet truculence as well as convincingly unseeing eyes.
Sharky and Richard have a semi-permanent houseguest, Ivan, a burly, affable soul who never seems to get home to his wife and kids because he's constantly distracted by the odd pint or five. There are also two uninvited and unwelcome guests. One is Nicky (Chris Genebach), a cocky younger man who is now living with Sharky's ex.
With him comes Mr. Lockhart, a man of few words, moderate habits, smooth manners and sharp clothes. In other words, he's everything his hosts are not—including immortal. Yes, he's your actual Devil, out collecting his debts in a human persona. In Allen McCullough's performance, Lockhart is seductively smooth and maddeningly arrogant—and just as capable of getting roaring drunk as any human Irishman. He's also painfully allergic to music, because that's what Heaven sounds like.
Lockhart is after Sharky's soul, but he's a sporting fellow and his rules stipulate that he must win it in a game of cards. That all-night contest consumes Act Two, in which the stakes are higher than the piles of euros on the table.
The Seafarer is billed as a comedy, and some of the tipsy quips and spats in McPherson's profane, tumbling dialogue are quite funny. But it's not an old-fashioned drunk act. There's sadness and insight in some of the barbs, like Richard's cruel, loving taunt at Sharky: "You're an alcoholic and your life is in tatters and you're an awful fucking gobshite. But you're alive, aren't you?"
Director Henry Wishcamper gets solid performances and fairly consistent Irish accents from his cast. There are some slack moments in Act One, but that may have more to do with the script's redundancies and whimsical detours than with Wishcamper's generally crisp staging.
In the end there's no fiery pit, but no easy redemption either. In this bleak midwinter, Sharky is already a soul in torment. Turns out Hell isn't other people, as Sartre said, but just the opposite. As Lockhart describes it, it's a cold, lonely, claustrophobic place, with no peace of mind and no relief in sight—not that different from Sharky's present life.
The play is titled The Seafarer not because Sharky was once a fisherman, but because its themes parallel an ancient Anglo-Saxon poem of that name—loss, loneliness, stoic suffering and spiritual yearning. It's also a seedy mirror image of the semi-legendary Hellfire Clubs of 18th-century England and Ireland, where it was said "gentlemen of quality" engaged in drunken excesses including mock-Satanic rituals.
The Seafarer plays through Dec. 21 at TheaterWorks, 233 Pearl St., Hartford, Conn., (860) 527-7838.
