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Theater: Preaching to the 'fock'
MTC finds the soul of the Emerald Isle in play about drunken Irish yobs

by Lee Brady

The Seafarer is a weird Christmas gift with layers of heathenish behavior covering up souls in torment who seek salvation.

Playwright Conor McPherson is one of the Irish darlings of the theater world. Martin McDonagh is the other, and both write about Ireland's common man—a mean religion-haunted drunk who speaks in poetically charged sentences that inevitably include the word "fockin'." But McDonagh's plays are full of dead bodies while McPherson deals with dead souls. Each provides an ounce of redemption for every pound of comic violence, while both provide a lively evening of theater.

McPherson's The Seafarer begins on Christmas Eve as Sharky (Andy Murray) cleans up after his brother Richard (Julian Lopez-Morillas) who is passed out on the floor. Ivan (Andrew Hurteau) wanders down the stairs looking for his glasses and moaning about how "he's going to be killed" by his wife when he goes home. Then Nicky (John Flanagan), an obnoxious man who lives with Sharky's ex-wife, comes in to add noise. This annoys Sharky, who has been sober for two days and is feeling judgmental. But Richard, who was suddenly struck blind on Halloween, wants another bottle. The conversation becomes deafening as each man competes with songs and stories. And then a stranger enters to take a hand in the annual Christmas poker game. Mr. Lockhart (Robert Sicular) is powerful and threatening in his neat suit; he provides the most dramatic moments in the play as he explains to Sharky just what hell really means.

Lopez-Morillas is hilarious as Richard, the filthy old drunk who falls flat on his face and gets up to fall again. But his boozy cheer on Christmas morning as he goes off to mass is contagious. Flanagan's Nicky is insufferable: Only a drunk would put up with him, and the actor raises the stakes on this braggart-bully to a high comic level. Hurteau plays the sympathy card well as lost-soul Ivan, who, like Sharky, has a dark secret. But the game is between Sharky and Lockhart, and actors Murray and Sicular make sure the audience feels both the chill and the heat of the hellfire consequences of the game.

Jasson Minadakis directs with a passionate intensity that keeps the story lively, although sometimes when the noise level gets higher than a sports bar on Monday night, it feels like audience abuse. This does give a dramatic intensity to the rare intimate moments.

So it turns out The Seafarer is a fine Christmas gift, with a cast who fockin' channel the Irish Catholic soul of a word-crazy playwright.

• • • •

There is little redemption to be found in the Magic Theatre's powerful and disturbing production of Evie's Waltz. Loretta Greco directs viscerally, and the threat of violence is constant as spotlighted rifle crosshairs and explosive bursts of weapon fire disturb a middle-class backyard barbecue. You may wonder about the Strauss waltzes and several random and melodramatic events, but there is no time to think during playwright Carter W. Lewis's harsh look at parenting and American society.

Lewis's play is a return to the golden days of the Magic Theatre when founder John Lion provided shock-a-dramas. Although no one gets naked here (as they usually did in Lion's productions), parents bushwhacked by their children was often a theme. Darren Bridgett and Julia Brothers are wonderfully balanced as Clay and Gloria, bickering parents of young Danny who has been suspended for bringing a gun to school. Gloria is furious, denying he is the son she bore and raised and wants only to "smother him with a pillow." Clay tends to his cooking and insists they can talk it out. When Danny's girlfriend Evie (Marielle Heller) arrives, tension mounts as the parents discover that their son is up on a hill opposite the patio with a rifle pointed at them.

Bridgett communicates the panic inside Clay as he strives to stay calm even as Gloria, who insists she's not in denial, has to face the facts. Brothers makes her vulnerability very real. Heller's conflicted teenager is painful to watch; Evie's a modern Juliet whose Romeo has plans in his locker for a Columbine-type shoot-out.

A moral fable for our time, or a well-directed melodrama? At any rate, it is an effective showcase for Loretta Greco, the Magic's new artistic director.

NOW PLAYING

The Seafarer runs through Dec. 14 at the Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller Ave., Mill Valley; 415/388-5208, www.marintheatre.org .

Evie's Waltz runs through Dec. 21 at the Magic Theatre, Bldg. D, Fort Mason Center, S.F.; 415/441-8822, www.magictheatre.org .