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(Joe tabacca for the boston globe) |
NEW YORK - Even as a boy growing up in Ireland, Conor McPherson always loved the thrills of a spine-tingling ghost story. When he would visit his grandfather in the Irish countryside, McPherson relished sitting by the fire and listening to the old man recount folk tales populated by phantoms and fairies. Later, he would lie awake in the blackness of the night, mesmerized by the mysterious fables he'd just heard.
Soon, the young McPherson was dreaming up his own haunting tales of supernatural occurrences and eerie premonitions and then spooking his childhood friends as they gathered around in the garage next to his home in Dublin.
"I always made sure there was a real, believable ordinariness to the stories because I knew that's what would make them truly scary," says McPherson. He's at the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan, just before his latest play, "The Seafarer," opened on Broadway in the fall. "It's bizarre how storytelling has always been there for me, and it's still a huge part of my life."
Indeed, McPherson's talent for spinning a good yarn has helped cement his reputation as one of the great young playwrights of his generation, a 36-year-old boy wonder with a knack for penning long, riveting monologues that contain the stops-and-starts of everyday speech, yet lift them into the poetic.
In "Shining City," which is being mounted by the Huntington Theatre Company, a grieving widower grips the audience with his account of seeing the phantom figure of his dead wife lurking in the dark recesses of their house, then reveals his guilt and self-loathing about the last years of their marriage.
"Conor retains the wonder and mystery of gathering people around a fire to hear a great story,says Robert Falls, who's directing the Boston premiere of "Shining City" as a co-production between the Huntington and Falls's Goodman Theatre in Chicago. "Young writers often forget that the theatrical experience basically began with 'Once upon a time . . .' That's one of the things that separates him from a lot of writers his age."
McPherson's spellbinding tales are marked by an intense fascination with the supernatural, rife with stories of spirits and demons from the netherworld. In "The Weir," a barroom full of lost souls swap increasingly disturbing ghost stories. In "St. Nicholas," a bitter, vitriolic theater critic gets caught up with a coven of vampires in suburban London. And in "The Seafarer," an ominous visitor in a camel hair coat and a flashy suit turns out to be Beelzebub himself.
While McPherson's stories are steeped in the traditions of Irish mythology, the phantoms in his dark fables serve a deeper purpose. They represent the characters' struggles with their innermost demons: regret, despair, alienation, and the seemingly fruitless quest to connect with other humans.
"I think a great way to articulate those deep, difficult feelings is by opening a door into the supernatural world," McPherson says. "It becomes a wonderful tool to express our own natural fears and our pain and our unfinished business as we grope through our lives."
In "Shining City," which premiered in London four years ago and was widely hailed as one of the best new plays in New York in 2006, the two men at its center are in different states of emotional turmoil. The guilt-wracked John, tormented by the ghostly vision of his recently deceased wife, visits a therapist, Ian, to try to make sense of the apparition and confess the unspoken truths and painful betrayals of a decaying marriage.
As the play unfolds, it becomes clear that the equally troubled Ian, a former Catholic priest, has his own phantoms rattling around in the closet.
"Both men are basically searching for forgiveness. They both feel that they're sinners. And they both feel, to some extent, that they're damned," Falls says by phone from Chicago. "I think the play is about the sometimes impossible act of communicating, but the necessity of trying."
Still, McPherson says he strives to keep a deep sense of the unconscious in his work and to leave the ultimate meaning of his plays ambiguous. "When I'm writing, I always want it to come from someplace that, in a way, I don't fully understand," he says. "It's got to be a mystery to me on some level. Otherwise, I think it's probably not that interesting."
McPherson began writing "Shining City" not long after he emerged from a tumultuous period in his own life - one that included a messy relationship meltdown and a well-chronicled battle with the demon drink. Seven years ago, he collapsed on the opening night of his play, "Port Authority," in the West End of London and was rushed to the hospital with an inflamed pancreas. He spent two months recovering, and the episode spurred him to get sober.
"For a long time, I was in a situation where I was badly managing my life in a very dysfunctional way - drinking to forget about my problems, that kind of stuff. Unfortunately, it comes back to bite you in the [expletive]," McPherson says. "Looking back, 'Shining City' was tapping into that particular pain from my own life. Although it was a very tough time, it ultimately led to a total renewal of me as a person, and also as an artist."
Indeed, chatting with the bespectacled McPherson at the Algonquin (once a gathering place for literary lights like Dorothy Parker and H.L. Mencken), he comes across like the quiet, unsung mastermind behind your favorite indie rock band. He's soft-spoken yet quick-witted, with only a trace of nervous energy bubbling under the surface. Now living a quiet existence in Dublin with his wife, Fionnuala Ni Chiosain, a painter, McPherson admits that his once-raging anxiety level has been dialed down in recent years.
Instead, he focuses on exorcising his fears and self-doubts through his writing.
"I think all my nervous energy from before now gets channeled in a very productive, positive way," he says. "I'm far less anxious, but I'm still driven by a need to explore and create. . . . Writing is almost a biological function for me. If it's not there in my life, I'm utterly lost."
His new play, "The Seafarer" (which he also directed), about a ragtag crew of liquor-sodden lost souls playing poker on Christmas Eve, represents something of a departure for the playwright. Not only has he largely abandoned his signature monologues in favor of a more traditional structure and a back-and-forth repartee among the characters, he also believes the play (which runs on Broadway through March 30) is his warmest and most hopeful yet.
Indeed, McPherson is eager to explore fresh territory as a writer. In the past, he's come under fire for the lack of female characters in his work. But his next project, an adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's apocalyptic short story, "The Birds" (on which Hitchcock based his 1963 horror classic), marks his first play written primarily from the female perspective.
McPherson may have his detractors, but actor David Morse ("St. Elsewhere"), who's co-starring in "The Seafarer," echoes the prevailing view that McPherson is one of the most important young playwrights working today.
"I think he's already written things that you can't believe a 22-year-old has written, that you can't believe a 27-year-old has written, and now a 36-year-old has written," he says. "It's hard to understand how somebody of such a young age can have such incredible insight into the experiences of people generations older than him and have a sense of the mysteries of living. His words always ring true."
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
