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Disconnection overshadows resonance in 'City'

By Lisa Bornstein, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published January 29, 2009 at 7 p.m.

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Patient and therapist (Ken Street, left, and Josh Hartwell) tackle the ways of guilt in "Shining City."

Photo by Richard H. Pegg

Patient and therapist (Ken Street, left, and Josh Hartwell) tackle the ways of guilt in "Shining City."

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REVIEW

So much of recent Irish theater, whether in the hands of Martin McDonagh or Conor McPherson, relies on our expectations of a windswept countryside full of small, hard-drinking villages.

It's refreshing, then, that McPherson places his recent work, Shining City, in the heart of Dublin, where a priest-turned-therapist encounters a haunted client while struggling with his own mysteries.

Strangely, though, at least in Richard Pegg's production at Miners Alley Playhouse, the play has neither an urban energy nor the desolate loneliness of McPherson's earlier work. Rather, the four performers feel disconnected, but not enough so that it emerges as a theme of the piece.

Josh Hartwell plays Ian, a former priest just beginning life as a therapist. He works in a barely furnished office, where he meets one of his first patients, John. The middle-aged man, played by Ken Street with a geniality that erupts in anguish, recently lost his wife in a car accident. He's plagued by his guilt and her ghost, to the extent that he can no longer sleep in his home. In America, he'd get some Ambien; in Dublin, he's moved into a bed-and-breakfast.

Two other characters appear briefly but pivotally in the play: Ian's stressed-out girlfriend (Laura Norman, unvarnished and immediate) and a rough, honest young hustler (Kevin Lowry, bringing a bracing flavor of squirrelly sweetness).

Hartwell is given little to work with. The script leaves him predominantly passive and silent, and we get little clue as to his motivations until late in the play. He spends much of his time far across the room from his patient, staring at notes or a computer. Perhaps this is to reinforce the disconnection, but it also creates a stage without a center. Street brings gentle humor to his stories, but the desperation never reaches the universal.

Only in the last moments do twin themes of faith and isolation emerge, and a final image, fantastically staged, gives the play more resonance than perhaps it has earned.

Shining City

* Grade: B-

* When and where: Through Feb. 15 at Miners Alley Playhouse, 1224 Washington Ave., Golden

* Cost: $20

* Information: 303-935-3044 or minersalley.com