Playwright: Conor McPherson. At: Writers' Theatre at Books on Vernon, 664 Vernon Ave., Glencoe. Tickets: 847-242-6000; www.writerstheatre.org; $35-$70. Runs through: Feb. 16, 2014
For men, the power of attraction almost always has a sexual component. Only rarely do men respond first to an uber-attraction in which sexual possibilities are secondary. Port Authority, set in contemporary Dublin, offers three who do. They tell their stories as interlocking monologues tinged with rue and outright regret but laced with humor.
Kevin, 20, is living on his own for the first time, not very successfully, with two rock band male flat mates and one female, Clare. Dermot is a career-challenged, alcoholic forty-something husband/dad who unexpectedly connects with his boss' wife. Joe is a widower living in a retirement home who questions whether his attraction to his next door neighbor 50 years ago was disloyal to his wife or sinful in God's eyes.
A true heir to the great Irish literary tradition, playwright Conor McPherson gives each character different cadences and vocabularies, extracting layered poetic richness from seemingly everyday speech. Kevin, not yet completely formed as a man, is more intuitively thoughtful than his male mates. Dermot talks and walks with swagger to counter his fears and failures. Joe is older, wiser and good and seems to have no issues except regrets. McPherson forges little links between the three narratives but they are clever rather than necessary. The question nagging all three is: could there have been more? Were Clare, the boss' wife and the woman next door, in fact, their destined soulmates? What would the cost have been to find out? As Joe puts it about his brief encounters with his neighbor, "I loved someone I didn't know."
Port Authority is an intimate play presented in a 50-seat theater with a small platform stage and three stools. Under skilled veteran director William Brown, the actors stroll through the audience as they deliver their highly personal stories. Big histrionics? No way. John Hoogenakker, as Dermot, is the loudest as called for by his substance-addled character. He speaks the fastest and prowls like a beast. Patrick Clear, as Joe, is the quiet one and perhaps the most ordinary, disappearing into his woolen sweater, and yet he's the one who most deeply questions what might have been. Fenton's Kevin, though, is the center of the play because he's the one who still has all his possibilities in front of him. Performed as an appealing good kid a girl could bring home to meet the folks, Kevin still has time to learn from his bad choices, and what may have been a missed opportunity with Clare.
Port Authority is a beautifully performed hour and 40 minutes of splendid language and unusual male introspection, as three men explain themselves not for what they have done but for what they did not do.