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Review: Shining City
Actors carve solid performances in 'City'
THEATER REVIEW | Lapse in final seconds can't tarnish sterling play
Taken from the January 22, 2008 issue of the Chicago Sun-Times
By Hedy Weiss
In his profound and truly radiant play, "Shining City," which opened Sunday at the Goodman Theatre in a searing production, Conor McPherson -- that most literate and soulful young contemporary Irish writer -- demonstrates many things. Perhaps chief among them is his affinity with an early 20th century English writer, E.M. Forster, author of Howard's End.
In fact, McPherson's tale of people aching to make meaningful human contact is the embodiment of the cry that drives Forster's book: "Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die."
In McPherson's play, most sensitively directed by Goodman artistic director Robert Falls (who also staged it on Broadway), you sense that desperate drive to "connect" most vividly in the long, brilliantly limned confessional monologue of John (John Judd, in a performance of sheer genius), a middle-aged Dublin widower who recounts to his young therapist, Ian (Jay Whittaker), the most intimate details of his long, troubled, but supremely valuable marriage. In the most exquisitely rendered detail, John relates his brief but devastating attempts at infidelity and the crushing guilt that has ravaged him since his wife died in a horrific auto accident -- a guilt so deep he believes he is being visited by her ghost.
You hear a similar desperation in the pragmatic pleas of Neasa (Nicole Wiesner), Ian's girlfriend, to keep their relationship going. Neasa, the woman who stood by Ian as he left the priesthood, also confesses to briefly straying when Ian's distractedness and her own hunger for connection overwhelmed her. A sense of unsated emotional hunger plagues Ian, too, with his need to connect manifested in a homoerotic encounter with yet another lost soul, Laurence (Keith Gallagher).
These guilt-emptying confessions and shifts of consciousness are the essential building blocks of "Shining City," a play whose elegantly simple structure (and similarly elegant set by Santo Loquasto) is supported by writing at once dazzlingly vivid and true, sporadically comic and invariably wise.
In Judd, McPherson has found an interpreter who seems cut from identical genetic material. For some years now, this Chicago actor has been turning in performances (a brilliant Iago in "Othello," a shattering Doc in "Come Back Little Sheba") so consistently astonishing and scarily revealing that you are left wondering why he is not an international star. His work here is extraordinary -- meticulously controlled yet unpredictable, whether self-mocking in his conjuring of heated, almost adolescent text messaging, or ravaged in his realization of the love he has squandered. A sublime performance.
Whittaker, wiry, tense and self-conscious as Ian, is the ideal listener, and he lets his character's inner quagmire surface in the most understated ways. Wiesner, womanly and real, does a fine balancing act of rage, ferocity and need. And Gallagher is spot on as a dark angel.
All, in fact, is perfection, until the play's utterly misguided final seconds, which nearly turn a riveting psychological drama into kitsch. Why did McPherson do it? Hard to know. Yet even this lapse cannot dim the beauty of "Shining City."
Theater Review
'Shining City'
Highly Recommended
When: Through February 17
Where: Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn
Tickets: $20 - $70
Call: (312) 443-3800
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