Shining City Goodman Theatre
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Set in contemporary Dublin, the play focuses on two men, Ian and John (two versions of the same name). Ian, a thirtysomething ex-priest, has just traded in the confessor’s booth for the counselor’s couch and set up shop as a therapist. (Santo Loquasto’s set, lit by Christopher Akerlind, evokes a dreary third-floor office in a dilapidated Victorian building; a high window provides a view of the Dublin skyline.) Like his old job, Ian’s new one requires him to listen to people express their grief and guilt, only now he offers understanding rather than absolution. He never comes out and says it, but essentially he’s chosen humanism over religion, science over superstition.
In light of that shift, it’s ironic that Ian’s first client, the 50ish John, is vexed by supernatural terrors: he thinks he’s being haunted by the ghost of his dead wife. Both men find the idea absurd—surely the “ghost” is a figment of John’s imagination, a projection of the torment he feels over his unhappy marriage and his sense of responsibility for his wife’s death in a car accident. In a long, circuitous monologue midway through this 95-minute one-act, John unleashes an eloquent torrent of painful revelations. He and his wife were childless, the objects of their friends’ condescending pity. The couple had long ago stopped communicating, and the gulf between them had widened when John pursued an extramarital affair and then visited a brothel—pathetic, futile attempts to find meaning in his existence.
A spooky last-minute twist ends the play on an uncertain note. Judging from conversations after the performance, some will be pleasantly jolted by the closing scene while others will regard it as cheap theatrical trickery. I think the final moment is fully justified: it makes the hopeful climax of Shining City more believable, reminding us that emotional victories must be constantly defended.
