Recently widowed John (Matthew Broderick) shares his haunting tale with his therapist, Ian (Billy Carter), in Irish Rep revival of Conor McPherson’s SHINING CITY (photo by Carol Rosegg)
Irish Repertory Theatre
132 West 22nd St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 3, $50
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The Irish Rep has inaugurated its newly renovated space in its longtime Chelsea home with a play very much about, appropriately enough, home. Back in the Stanwick Building on West Twenty-Second St. following a season at the DR2 Theatre in Union Square, the Irish Rep is currently presenting a thrilling version of Conor McPherson’s Tony-nominated Shining City, a haunting psychological tale of dislocation, lack of communication, guilt, and the search for one’s place in the world. Matthew Broderick, in full Irish brogue, gives a thoroughly impressive performance as John, a fifty-four-year-old Dublin catering-supply rep who is seeing a therapist for the first time because he claims to have seen the ghost of his recently deceased wife in their house. Frightened and confused, John has temporarily moved into a bed and breakfast, but his disconnection began when his wife was still alive. “I started pretending I had to stay down the country, for work, you know, overnight, but I was really just staying in places so that I didn’t have to deal with the terrible pressure of going home, you know?” he tells his therapist, Ian (Billy Carter), a former priest who has left the house of God for a cozy third-floor office. Ian, meanwhile, is reconsidering his future with his wife, Neasa (Lisa Dwan), and their baby, who live with Ian’s brother. “I have nowhere to fucking go!” she screams at him when he talks about leaving her. “It’s their house! What right do I have to stay there if you’re not there?” Later, Ian meets Laurence (James Russell), a destitute man who has taken to the streets to try to survive after being kicked out of his cousin’s flat. “I don’t even want to go back, though, but I need an address,” a haggard Laurence tells Ian. Nearly everyone the four characters reference in their various stories relate to the concept of home, from a builder and a hotel executive to the B&B owners and women in a house of prostitution. Over the course of one hundred minutes, the four lost souls examine their loneliness and try to find a way out, to reconnect.
Shining City — which was nominated for a Best Play Tony for its Broadway debut in 2006, directed by Goodman Theatre head Robert Falls and starring Oliver Platt as John, Martha Plimpton as Neasa, Peter Scanavino as Laurence, and a Tony-nominated Brían F. O’Byrne as Ian — is a brilliantly written work, an intricate and endlessly inventive investigation into the hearts and minds of John and Ian, who are mirror images of each other; even their names are the same, as Ian is the Scottish version of John. John, a traveling salesman, often speaks in long monologues filled with the adjective “fucking” and the rhetorical phrase “you know” — the latter is spoken more than two hundred times throughout the play, and not just by John — during which Ian merely nods or makes quick comments; one entire scene is essentially a riveting soliloquy delivered exquisitely by Broderick in a breathless tour de force. Carter (McPherson’s Port Authority and The Weir at the Irish Rep), Beckett specialist Dwan (Not I / Footfalls / Rockaby), Russell (Port Authority, Juno and the Paycock), and two-time Tony winner Broderick (Torch Song Trilogy, Brighton Beach Memoirs) beautifully perform McPherson’s fragmented dialogue, maintaining its graceful poetic rhythm under the smooth direction of Ciarán O’Reilly (The Weir, The Hairy Ape). Charlie Corcoran’s therapist-office set subtly evokes the concept of home as well, with several boxes strewn around that hint at either someone moving in or moving out, and John settles in a little more with each visit even as Ian feels more uncomfortable. Shining City is an impeccable, haunting piece of theater and a deserving drama to welcome the Irish Rep, well, back home.
Writer-director Baltasar Kormákur’s adaptation of Arnaldur Indriðason’s award-winning novel Jar City is a bleak but compelling police procedural that focuses on a fact-based controversial government initiative that is cataloging genetic research on all Icelandic families. When an aging man named Holberg (Thorsteinn Gunnarsson) is murdered in his home, brooding inspector Erlendur (Ingvar E. Sigurdsson) heads the investigation into the death, leading him to a thirty-year-old rape, a dirty cop, a trio of criminals (one of whom has been missing for a quarter century), a woman who killed herself shortly after her four-year-old daughter died, and a doctor who collects body parts. The divorced Erlendur also has to deal with his troubled daughter (Augusta Eva Erlendsdottir), a pregnant drug addict who hangs out with some very sketchy company. Meanwhile, a mysterious man (Atli Rafn Sigurdarson) is up to something following the traumatic death of his young daughter. Kormakur weaves together the story line of the two fathers side by side — in the book, the unidentified man appears only near the conclusion, although who he is still remains a mystery for most of the film — centering on the complex relationship between parents and children and what gets passed down from generation to generation, both on the outside and the inside. Sigurdsson plays Erlendur with a cautious seriousness, the only humor coming from the way he treats his goofy partner, Sigurdur Oli (Bjorn Hlynur Haraldsson). Iceland’s entry for the 2007 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar and winner of the Crystal Globe at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Jar City is a dark, tense intellectual thriller. Indriðason has turned Erlendur into a continuing character in such follow-ups as Silence of the Grave and Voices; we were hoping Kormákur and Sigurdsson would do the same, but instead the director has gone on to make such Hollywood fare as Contraband, 2 Guns, and Everest. Jar City will be screening on June 22 and 23 in the IFC Center series “Cold Cases: The Department Q Trilogy and the New Nordic Noir,” which runs through June 23 and includes such other cool films as Daniel Espinosa’s Easy Money, Henrik Ruben Genz’s Terribly Happy, and Morten Tyldum’s Headhunters.
