Your Support Can
Make the Difference!

Brigit Saint Brigit's annual celebration of Ireland commences this season on Friday, February 17th, with an encore production of the Tony-nominated play The Seafarer, from Dublin's Tony Award-winning playwright Conor McPherson (author of The Weir and Shining City).  Known for compelling storytelling that weaves myth and the supernatural with roof-raising comedy and surprising compassion, this work may be his most magnetic yet.

 

The Story

It's Christmas Eve in the small, old, coastal town of Baldoyle (technically, North Dublin), and the Harkin household, such as it is, is preparing for its traditional poker game.  Not such an odd holiday tradition when you consider the motley group assembled: middle-aged brothers Richard and Sharkey Harkin and old friends Ivan and Nicky.

Richard is now on disability since his recent accident--while retrieving rolls of wallpaper out of a dumpster, the lid hit him on the head, resulting in his blindness.   (He didn't need the wallpaper, was just curious.) Not to worry--Richard's  rambunctiousness and enthusiasm for drink, social craic, and the Christmas season is unimpaired. And having inherited the humble home of his deceased parents while now receiving a regular paycheck, he's neither in danger of being homeless or without the resources for liquid celebration.  Also, he has a brother, Sharky, back home now.

 A troubled and dissolute wanderer, Sharkey's love for the drink has led him away from Baldoyle and through a life of various brief stints of employment, pub brawls, legal trouble, and failed relationships. But now he's home, come back to start over and take care of his brother.  And Christmas Eve is his second day off the drink.

 Ivan—so close a friend as almost to be family—finds refuge at the Christmas Eve poker table after his own domestic chaos. And then there's Nicky—welcomed by Richard (not so much by the other two), he's "a good-looking but feckless lad now keeping company with Sharkey's ex" (NYT). But on this night, his fecklessness will transform (unbeknownst to him and everyone else) a drunken poker game into a gamble for Sharky's eternal soul. Nicky brings a friend he picked up in a pub earlier in the evening (or perhaps one who picked him up): "Mr Lockhart, an incongruously dapper stranger [who] . . . initiates high stakes in the poker game—damningly high" (as above).

 "Though Mr. Lockhart initially seems to blend right into the boozy camaraderie, it gradually emerges [to Sharky alone] that he [Lockhart] is a man apart, if man is the right word.  . . . Yes, he's the very Devil" and has come to collect on a long-forgotten promise for the chance to play cards for Sharky's soul.

 "Not that you think in such lofty terms while you're listening to the liveliest, funniest dialogue yet."  As the NYT’s Ben Brantley suggests, The Seafarer "may be just the pick-me-up play of the season."

 Contemporary Storytelling and Irish Tradition

Many young, contemporary Irish playwrights seek to throw off or satirize centuries-old Irish storytelling traditions (or "Irishness")—comedy in the face of evidence to the contrary, lyrical dialogue, the presence of history, and the power of myth and the supernatural. Yet without sacrificing realism, McPherson's imagination and experience combine to convey the great undercurrent of belief, joy, and quixotic hope that have characterized Irish playwrights from Synge to Friel. Forsaking cleverness and self-indulgence for humor and honest characterizations, The Seafarer's alchemy springs from a magnetically-familiar myth given vibrant new life by the all-too-real foibles of characters which— believe it or not— we not only relate to, but really like.

 From London to Broadway

Only a year after his stunning (and, again, Tony Award-winning) triumph with Shining City, McPherson's Seafarer opened in 2006 at the National Theatre in London, with a cast including Katl Johnson, Jim Norton, Conleth Hill, Michael McElhatton, and Ron Cook.  A year later it premiered on Broadway at the Booth Theatre with Sean Mahon and Ciaran Hinds (replacing McElhatton and Cook) and David Morse (the only non-Irishman, replacing Johnson). Both productions were directed by the playwright. It received four Tony Award nominations.

 BSB's Revival

Originally produced four years ago at Brigit, the Theatre has received numerous requests for a re-mount, and as luck would have it, the schedules of all the initial actors coincided to make this February/March production possible.  Again directed by Artistic Director Cathy Kurz and stage managed by Rachael Surge Miller, BSB's production includes a charismatic company of actors.

 The Cast

---Tom Becker, outrageously funny, renders the irascible older brother, Richard;

---Eric Griffith as Sharkey— whose soul is the object of Mr. Lockhart's visit—travels from the broad comedy of harried caretaker of his out-of-control brother to horror, guilt, and regret at the looming prospect of eternal damnation.

---Scott Working as Ivan, conveys a childlike loyalty, even as he’s deceptively and heartbreakingly more conflicted than the uncomplicated family friend he seems.

---Jeremy Earl plays the unwittingly hilarious (and universal) hanger-on, Nicky, seeking to impress with everything from his fake Versace jacket to his new cheese-mongering career. 

---And Terry Doughman, disguised as the dapper sophisticate, the stranger Mr. Lockhart—“the son of the morning/the snake in the garden," terrifyingly realizes McPherson's portrait of both the merciless hunter of souls and the bitter and isolated entity whose ego has caused his own pain.