Petersen/Morton 'Dublin Carol:' Sadness and a Wish for Hope

The very first snowflakes of Chicago's coming winter season started to fall on me this past Sunday afternoon, as I made my way out of Steppenwolf Theatre Company's Near North Side complex and a press performance in the Upstairs Theatre of Conor McPherson's "Dublin Carol." That is the most Christmasy thing that happened to me the entire afternoon. Well, there ARE a few decorations strewn about the set.

And that's the point. The regretful alcoholic and emerging curmudgeon at the center of this taut ninety-minute three-hander, John, is a man facing the demons and ghosts of his life, wondering whether redemption (or even normal human interaction) is beyond him. Not the happiest of holiday topics. As brought to life by the formidable actor William Petersen, a dyed-in-the-wool Chicago stage actor more recently known as star and producer of one of television's most successful dramas ("CSI: Crime Scene Investigation," for those of you without electronics), John is a pretty real and pretty sorry man, evoking but by no means copying a certain Ebenezer Scrooge in a certain other "Carol" play you may have heard about or seen (for those of you with theaters in your life, natch). This is not a tour-de-force "star" performance, but a thoroughly ensemble, leading man turn, crafted and lived, authoritatively delivered. 

Contemporary playwright McPherson has provided a script that is as colorful in language as any Irish drama you could name. (It sure sounds like English, but these Irish folk are fascinating in the way they use their adopted tongue!-dialect coaching here by Cecilie O'Reilly.) And as death has emerged as a theme in McPherson's work, it should come as no surprise that John runs a funeral home, and that the play's single setting is the dingy back office of said establishment, a sort-of hard-knock-life one-room apartment with a old wooden desk on one wall, a couch and chair, sink and stove taking far more prominence. (The set of the Steppenwolf production, lovely in its detailing, is by Kevin Depinet.)

In the course of one recent Christmas Eve afternoon, John plays host to his new employee, a twenty-year old bloke named Mark, and his somewhat estranged daughter, Mary, come to take John to see his very estranged wife in the hospital, dying with "cancer in her neck." Her brother, Paul, is even more estranged. (McPherson's use of New Testament names for all his characters, seen and unseen, is made somewhat tolerable by the Irish Catholic milieu they inhabit-otherwise it seems a mite gimmicky. Perhaps I quibble.)

This production is a gift to Chicago theatergoers from Steppenwolf and its company member Amy Morton (late of the Chicago and New York "August: Osage County" and the director of "Dublin Carol"), and it has its roots at Trinity Rep in Providence, Rhode Island (where Peterson and Morton first collaborated on this play last year) and in Chicago's Remains Theatre Ensemble, founded by Petersen in 1979 and where Morton was a member prior to her Steppenwolf association. 

As far as the two other cast members go, Stephen Louis Grush (Mark) has previous experience with dramas at Steppenwolf and Nicole Wiesner (Mary) has Goodman Theatre experience with Conor McPherson. (They are both excellent, by the way, listening with great depth and telling and recalling and evoking with complexity and guts. Grush is a handsome, wiry young Roosevelt University graduate and Wiesner is a smart, earthy intellect and artistic associate of Trap Door Theatre.)

In creating a Christmas story about a man, perhaps about a group of people, who have nothing to celebrate and no one readily available to celebrate with, McPherson and Morton have not delivered a proverbial bag of coal as much as they have provided the flip side to all the cheeriness of hearth and home that traditional holiday entertainments evoke. Psychologists and sociologists tell us that there are plenty of folks in the world for whom the year-end holidays are far from happy-those who are alone, those whose loved ones died in December, those who wish their lives were different and discover that they are fairly powerless to create change, etc. The particular world seen here (fleshed out by drab, lived-in costumes by Ana Kuzmanic and grey lighting by Robert Christen) becomes universal in its specific depiction of a life probably too far gone with drink and bad choices to fully regain the promise and potential of youth.