“Shining City”
Written by Conor McPherson
Showing: Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn, through Feb. 17
Tickets: $30-$70
Contact: (312) 443-3800; goodman-theatre.org

By Lawrence Bommer

CFP theater editor

It takes a village to make an Irish play—or it used to. The new Dublin represented by 37-year-old Irish playwright Conor McPherson is as modern in alienating its citizens and abandoning tradition as its plethora of Euro dollars and cybercafes (where communal drinking is hardly the main activity).

“Shining City,” which Goodman Theatre artistic director Robert Falls directed last season on Broadway and which he now brings to Chicago with a strong local cast, is a puzzling 90 minutes (reputedly, the first play McPherson wrote while sober). Here the usual Big “Cs”—context, causes, connections, consequences and crises, don’t apply. That may well be the point but it’s hardly gripping. The old beliefs—ghosts, religion (the title alludes to heaven), marriage for procreation—are left behind, while new ones—psychotherapy and casual sex—have yet to fill the void.

Ian (Jay Whittaker) is a Dublin therapist and, significantly, a former priest whose patient John (John Judd) is a childless, 52-year-old caterer whose wife recently died in an especially pointless car crash. Driven sleepless by visions of his wife’s ghost, John has left his home and sought knee-jerk sex to drive away this too-close memory. Ian has also left home, here his brother’s house, abandoning his common-law Neasa (Nicole Wiesner), who also left orders, and child to these unsympathetic relatives. Finally, another, strangely sympathetic character (Keith Gallagher) appears to expose a different side of Ian’s life of denial.

In scenes that play more like episodes from a series than parts of a play, the characters clumsily reach out to help or hurt. Ian sees his diminished duty, not as a priest who can intercede with heaven, but as a good listener who helps “stuck” people get out of their rut and move on. By the end, he’s returned to his fiancee and child and is moving to Limerick. John, unhaunted again, has found love and is also relocating.

Oddly indeed, this seemingly contemporary “Shining City” ends with a genuine Gothic-style shock effect straight out of an Irish nightmare. No question, it has its effect but, an instant later, seems gratuitous and silly, a punchline with no setup. 

It’s one of the few false notes in Falls’ painstaking and sometimes moving look at lonely folks searching for balance amid a major city’s relentless change. Very athletically driven, Whittaker’s trouble-seeker Ian, Wiesner’s magnificently anguished and totally helpless wife and, especially, Judd’s haunted husband dying for the slightest hope—these roles won’t harmonize into an ensemble. They’re sadly separate. If they connect, it’s as arbitrary as anything in the city. Only the ghosts, it seems, persist.