When God closes a door, he should open a laptop. The Goodman Theatre production of Conor McPherson’s Shining City suffers from a few minor flaws in the acting but ultimately fails to satisfy due to deficiencies in the script. There are five scenes in this one-act play. In terms of the writing, the three odd scenes are the most even. The dialogue of the odd scenes clips along, unforced and natural. The play takes place on one set, in the apartment of the pensive lead character.
The play centers on an Irish therapist, Ian, who has recently moved and is now using his new digs as both living quarters and office space. Into his offices comes John, a new patient, referred to Ian to help him through some difficulties partially spawned by recently becoming a widower. It is safe to say that some of the problems John faces are far removed from normal fare for a standard therapist, but once the two delve into them the acceptance that this relationship will continue seems natural and well-explored. John, too, finds himself unable to reside in his own home and speaks in part of having taken up residence elsewhere.
It was not long ago that Ian faced some difficult times of his own, and with some help from Neasa, moved on, and they had a child together. Now however, something is gnawing at Ian and driving a wedge between the young couple. We soon discover that Ian is separated from his child and the child’s mother. This situation is responsible for Ian’s relocation, but he has left his lover behind in a place where she feels unwelcome: the home of Ian’s brother and his brother’s wife.
Late in the play, into this mix is thrown an additional character Laurence, a person struggling to survive, mostly on the streets and living by a means to which Ian is simultaneously drawn and repulsed. During this scene, Ian seems to find a way to admit something to himself while at the same time having the opportunity to discover a number of truths.
Ian, played by Jay Whittaker, is the focal point of the play. Whittaker does an admirable job trying to hold his own in the often frenetic scenes with John, despite Ian having very little dialogue. I cannot help but feel the set does not lend itself well to the audience being able to pick up on just when to shift our focus from the speaker to the listener. Indeed, with so much of Whittaker’s role designated to listening and reacting one might have hoped that the staging would have put the audience in better position to more easily keep an eye on both actors at the same moment.
John Judd is brilliant as John, a recent widower with some nagging, past errors in judgment he needs to exorcise. In by far the best written part in the play, Judd makes the most of the dialect to enthrall the audience and builds an empathy that fills the theatre. One cannot help but be in John’s corner, despite his flaws and the missteps of his past.
Nicole Wiesner as Neasa, Ian’s estranged lover, is certainly charming enough, but one gets the impression that her role is a slave to the plot. Ian’s backstory is given to us in a handful of lines seeded throughout the dialogue between Ian and Neasa. But the two do not move forward in this scene so much as get straight what Ian has, prior to the action of the play, already determined will be his path. Ian has already moved on, Neasa just has not realized it yet. By the end of the scene, we know that Ian has problems of his own that have made his decision to leave Neasa and daughter inevitable for him. I do not believe, however, that the writing ever fully supports the existence of the problems or the choices made by the characters.
Keith Gallagher as Laurence is well cast, but his character, as is Neasa’s, is only briefly explored. Sadly, the actors seemed to have realized that the play falls a bit flat in the Neasa and Laurence scenes and it comes across on stage. While I can understand the impulse to use some of the awkwardness of the scenes to inform the awkward relationships between the characters, that works less well when the dialogue cannot keep the audience in the world of the play and we are left to watching the quality of the acting.
Ultimately, it is an evening of theatre worth watching to catch the scenes between Judd and Whittaker. I only wish the Ian backstory was shared in some other manner and the focus of the play remained on these two characters. The play ends abruptly and would have benefited by using the three John/Ian scenes as the basis for a first act and then exploring how John might have in turn helped Ian through his troubles as a focus for a second act.
Shining City runs at the Goodman Theatre through Feb. 17. More information can be found at goodmantheatre.org