Shining City
Synopsis: Shining City?
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Set in present-day Dublin, Shining City takes place in the disheveled office of Ian, a former priest turned therapist. Ian is visited by John, a middle-aged man who has recently lost his wife in a tragic accident. John is having trouble sleeping and is desperate for help, but Ian has his own troubles, including a new baby and a crumbling relationship. John soon reveals the source of his insomnia: he's been visited by the ghost of his dead wife and is now terrified to return home. In this contemporary ghost story, Conor McPherson explores what it means to lose faith-in God, in relationships and in one's self.
Shining City runs one hour and 30 minutes without intermission.
Why Shining City?
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At a shockingly young age, Conor McPherson has garnered a world-class reputation as one of the most talented playwrights now writing for the English-language theater, achieving international success with his unerring ear for dialogue and vivid sense of character. Although he is certainly part of a venerable tradition of Irish writers for the stage, McPherson is perhaps most influenced by the plays of David Mamet, and he often cites works like Sexual Perversities in Chicago and American Buffalo as models for his own work. Like Mamet, McPherson creates dialogue that appears realistic at first glance, but is actually artfully composed and highly poetic. These words are spoken by a cross section of contemporary Irish characters, all of whom exist in a "new" Ireland, a country whose recently acquired economic prosperity has thrust it firmly into the European culture of the 21st century. But McPherson's characters are not part of this success; they are instead the outsiders, the native Dubliners who have been left behind by their increasingly internationalized, economically driven society. In their world, the traditional tenets of Catholic faith have lost their power amid the scandal and the corruption that economic evolution often brings. Robbed of their faith, surrounded by a society whose evolution has been swift and often unnerving, McPherson's characters are adrift in an unfamiliar landscape, left to search for a god and faith that are now alien to them.
McPherson began his career writing monologues for the stage and quickly became a master of the form. Many of his subsequent plays (including his most widely known play, The Weir) have incorporated the extended monologue as a core dramatic device. As his craft has evolved, these monologues have become increasingly sophisticated in their delineation of dramatically explosive characters and situations. (His latest work The Seafarer, which will premiere this season on Broadway, contains no monologues whatsoever.) Much of his earlier writing was also informed by the Irish curse of alcohol; the articulateness of his characters was fueled by Irish whiskey and Guinness. McPherson is intimately aware of this curse: his own battles with alcoholism culminated in a life-threatening physical breakdown several years ago. Fortunately, he recovered, and Shining City is the first play that he wrote in the cold light of sobriety, making it, I think, a particularly gripping investigation of the human mind and soul.
I first met Conor McPherson several years ago in Dublin and found that he admired my work as much as I admired his. Although he has directed many of his own plays (including the Dublin and London premieres of Shining City), he was unavailable for the New York premiere two seasons ago and graciously asked me to take on the project. I was thrilled to do so, and I am equally excited to revisit this remarkable work a second time-this time with a terrific Chicago-based cast. I have no doubt that the plays of Conor McPherson will be placed among the classics of the theater for future generations, and I know that Shining City will stand high in that canon of work. It is a rich, poetic and harrowing journey through the labyrinth of the heart and the spirit.
Robert Falls
Artistic Director
Ghosts of Ireland:
Conor McPherson and the New Generation of Irish Playwrights
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By Tanya Palmer
When Conor McPherson's Shining City opened on Broadway, it became one of a trio of Irish plays taking up residence on the Great White Way. Joining it was The Lieutenant of Inishmore, a pitch-black comedy by McPherson's contemporary, Martin McDonagh. Brian Friel, an elder stateman of the Irish theater, rounded out the group with Faith Healer, a contemplative, incisive character study. This coincidence of timing set into sharp relief the energy and vitality of the Irish theater scene and offered a unique perspective on Conor McPherson's place within the contemporary dramatic literature of his homeland.
For an island of fewer than 5 million people, Ireland has played a remarkable role on the world stage. Irish-born playwrights have held sway over the English-speaking world for well over two centuries. From Richard Brinsley Sheridan, George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde to Sean O'Casey, Brendan Behan and Samuel Beckett, Irish playwrights have not only offered us stories that have become central to Western literature, they have also forged new ground politically and stylistically.
Represented by McPherson and McDonagh, along with their contemporaries, this new crop of Irish writers has inherited a very different Ireland from their predecessors. Once a traditional rural culture, Ireland has become a predominantly urban country that is plugged into the global economy and is part of the new information age. The values and stories that shaped that former country, however, continue to haunt the work of Irish playwrights.
McDonagh's work, filled as it is with violence, boredom and savage humor, is influenced as much by contemporary American pop culture as it is by the great tradition of Irish playwrights stretching back to Synge and O'Casey. His dystopian vision of the small Irish town demythologizes the rich community feeling and spiritual meaning of the rural Irish landscape.
McPherson's work, while firmly grounded in the urban, secular world in which he grew up, has a much gentler, more complex relationship with the traditional Irish landscape and values. This is perhaps most evident in his play The Weir, which is set in the same kind of rural community depicted in McDonagh's work. But rather than skewering the Irish countryside as McDonagh does, McPherson presents an almost idyllic version of the old community, represented by a group of people telling ghost stories in a pub. Through this focus on the way in which storytelling can both forge communities and transform individuals, we see McPherson's debt to Brian Friel.
Friel's Faith Healer is a Rashomon-style trio of monologues that tell the story of Francis Hardy, a traveling faith healer, whose fall is revealed through the eyes of Hardy himself, his wife and his manager. A parable about the artist's relationship to his art, Faith Healer is also a stunning depiction of the death of the traditional Irish way of life. Friel, who at age 77 is a generation older than McPherson, was part of a wave of Irish playwrights in the 1960s who chronicled Ireland's seismic shift from a rural, peasant society to a new, uncertain urban world.
Set in a nondescript office on the fringes of present-day Dublin, Shining City seems to have shed the vestiges of the old world that were present in The Weir. McPherson's characters-Ian, a former priest turned therapist and John, a salesman turned grieving husband-meet in Ian's office to try and work through the ghosts of their pasts, as the more traditional support networks of family, friends and religion have failed them.
This echo of a past governed by faith and a way of life governed by ties to the land and local community is as deeply present for the urban characters of Shining City as it is for McPherson's rural pub patrons in The Weir. His plays suggest that it's not death that's of interest, but how the reverberations of death continue to haunt the living. Little wonder this young writer is so obsessed with ghost stories.
Back from the Edge: Conor McPherson, So Far
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By Kyle W. Brenton, originally printed in the Huntington Theatre Company's Limelight Literary Guide 2007-2008, edited by Ilana M. Brownstein
In 2001 Conor McPherson was only 30 and at the top of the theatrical world. He had written more than 10 plays, had three films to his credit, won numerous awards and was a burgeoning star on this side of the Atlantic with his play The Weir enjoying a smash eight-month run on Broadway.
But when his new play Port Authority opened at Dublin's Gate Theatre on a cold February night, McPherson nearly lost it all. He collapsed and was raced to the hospital with a life-threatening case of pancreatitis. And after spending three weeks unconscious and two months in the hospital, he was forced to face the root cause of his illness: alcoholism.
McPherson was born in 1971 to a middle-class family in the northern suburbs of Dublin. As a boy he attended a strict Catholic school, where the beatings he received in payment of his sins convinced him, by the age of 15, to abandon the faith. "Even if I was going to die and go to hell, I would prefer to be free in my life," he told the Guardian.
McPherson studied English and philosophy at University College, Dublin, and while philosophy inspired him to enter a master's program and tutoring, it was English that introduced him to his first great theatrical inspiration: David Mamet. "The day I read Glengarry Glen Ross, that was it," he told the Guardian. "I knew exactly what I was going to do."
At university, McPherson wrote and directed his own work. After leaving school, he co-founded Fly By Night Theater through which he put up his plays in pubs and small theaters around Dublin. In 1995, a British theatrical agent saw his play This Lime Tree Bower and quickly signed the young writer. Success followed success. The Weir was a hit in both London and New York, and it won McPherson the most coveted theater honor in England-an Olivier Award for Best New Play.
But amid this success, McPherson's personal life was quietly falling apart. By his own estimation, his alcoholism began around 1997. "I was tasting independence and freedom, but I was irresponsible and probably the wrong person to have it. I became dependent on drinking: you think it makes you feel better, but all you're ever doing is keeping withdrawal at bay." While he did not write under the influence, he did get drunk every day, and friends reported that he did most of his heavy drinking alone.
After his collapse in Dublin in 2001, McPherson turned his life around. He quit drinking and focused on his writing again. In 2003 he married the Irish painter Fionnuala Ni Chiosain, who says of her husband since his illness, "He's a more peaceful person. The chaos is gone." McPherson contends that his sobriety "opens up even wider vistas for me."
The playwright's time spent in the crucible of alcoholism and recovery left its mark, which is clearly present in Shining City. The play headlined the Dublin Theatre Festival in 2004 and quickly moved to the Royal Court Downstairs and then to Broadway in 2006. The play's main character, the priest-turned-therapist Ian, was inspired by the professionals McPherson encountered while in recovery. "In going to therapists," he says, "I realized how many crazy people are in that job. To want to do a job like that you have to be very attracted to dysfunction."
Like McPherson, both Ian and his patient John are trying to put their lives back together after cataclysmic events-Ian's loss of faith and John's loss of his wife. As The Daily Telegraph so aptly puts it, Shining City is "palpably a play by a writer in recovery from his own inner demons."