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Shining City
By Conor McPherson
Directed by Robert Falls
At the Goodman Theatre
170 N. Dearborn
Chicago, IL
Call 312-44303800, tickets $20 - $70
Tuesday Feb. 2 at 7:30 pm
Wednesdays t 7:30 pm
Thursdays at 2 & 7:30 pm
Fridays at 8 pm
Saturdays at 2 7 8 pm
Sundays at 2 & 7:30 pm
Running time is 95 minutes with no intermission
Through February 17, 2008
Splendid script fuels psychological drama
Conor McPherson, Brian Friel and Martin McDonagh are the finest living Irish playwrights with McPherson being the youngest and emerging as the best. His Shining City, a 2006 Tony Award nominee, is once more directed by Robert Falls in its Chicago debut at the Goodman Theatre. Shining City is a brilliant play! It is an intriguing mystery, part psychological drama, part ghost story with equal parts humor and humanity. This 95 minute gem is superbly cast and paced by Robert Falls, who mounted the Broadway show.
Conor McPherson has a keen ear for dialogue in the style of David Mamet or Harold Pinter with use of naturalistic dialogue often with one character finishing the other’s sentences. McPherson loves to create characters who are struggling to connection and make sense of their lives as each search for love and faith.
In Shining City, we find Ian (Jay Whittaker) a psychotherapist in contemporary Dublin with his new patient, John (John Judd), a middle aged salesman, who is distraught with guilt over the death of his wife in a horrible auto accident. John has trouble sleeping and desperately wants Ian’s help. John eventually reveals the source of his insomnia: he is visited by the ghost of his wife.
This tightly structured drama mirrors John’s troubles with Ian’s self loathing and guilt. We learn in a powerful scene with Neasa (Nicole Wiesner), Ian’s girlfriend that Ian is an ex-priest who has lost both his vocation and his faith. He struggles to find his place in the world. Neasa loves him and wants him to share a life together with their daughter. Ian is a terrific listener whose demons erupt leaving him pondering who he is. Both John and Ian are working at salvaging their live after cataclysmic events.
McPherson demonstrates his wry, often hilarious self-deprecating wit in the marvelous monologues John Judd delivers with an astonishingly truthful performance as the guilt-ridden widower. Judd exudes charm, warmth and desperation as his guilt and loneliness pour forth. Judd’s excellent Dublin brogue is authentic as he rationalizes his relationship with his dead wife. We learn how unfulfilled John’s married life became. We learn why his guilt could be the source of his sightings.
Jay Whittaker is perfect as the brooding troubled psychotherapist. Whittaker knows how to let his inter demons out in emotionally charged spurts after he patiently listens to John’s troubles. Whittaker and Keith Gallagher have a strange scene depicting Ian’s struggle for connection to someone in a homoerotic encounter.
Shining City is a subtle, layered drama filled with extremely haunting dialogue performed to near perfection by John Judd with excellent work from Nicole Wiesner and Jay Whittaker. Come to the Goodman Theatre to see a fresh voice in Conor McPherson.
Highly Recommended
Tom Williams
Tom99@chicagocritic.com for comments
Talk Theatre in Chicago podcast
Date Reviewed: January 21, 2008
Jeff Recommended
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