Playwright: Conor McPherson
At: Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted
Phone: 312-335-1650; $50-$70
Runs through: Jan. 4
Let's see: You've got your jocose drunk, your bellicose drunk, your lachrymose drunk, your morose drunk and your comatose drunk. In literary circles, however, you will find a preponderance of introspective drunks—intelligent, sometimes even brilliant, men and women capable of articulating the sources, stages and solutions of their destructive habit in clinical detail. Between drinks, that is.
Before the Grim Reaper issued him a warning in 2001, playwright Conor McPherson was such a drunk. So is John Plunkett, the hero of Dublin Carol, albeit older and thus saddled with a longer list of regrets. Plunkett is a former sodden drunk, plucked from the edge of the abyss by an undertaker looking to hire and rehabilitated into a functional drunk—sipping throughout the day, but never becoming boisterous or sloppy. ( If these distinctions are lost on you, your knowledge of the species is too narrow. ) But on this Christmas Eve, his mentor is lying ill, his estranged wife is dying, his doggedly-loyal daughter wants him to pay his last respects and his young assistant needs some advice.
The date is auspicious for miracles, whether occurring to financiers in Victorian London or cabbies in millennial Chicago. But salvation doesn't always announce itself with fanfare, even in plays. Since McPherson's play—written while still consorting with spirits of the destructive kind—is essentially a monologue interrupted by other characters, it's easy to overlook the subtle manifestations of Plunkett's quiet despair in a business where the transience of the corporal world is impossible to ignore, or the moment when he makes the decision to alter the course of his life. Unlike Dickens, McPherson doesn't supply an epilogue to tell us how long his resolve continues, but for now, the first step is enough.
William L. Peterson couldn't have selected a better role to banish audiences' memories of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, the immensely popular television series providing him work for the last nine years ( and what this venture doesn't accomplish, next spring's Blackbird at Victory Gardens surely will ) . But Dublin Carol is no mere star vehicle—not as directed by ensemble-oriented Chicago veteran Amy Morton. Stephen Louis Grush as the lad who will someday become Plunkett's boss and Nicole Wiesner as one of the children whose apples fell sadly close to their father's tree both carry their share of the dramatic burden with sturdy conviction and dialects accurate, but not obtrusive, while the design team locates us in just the sort of cluttered, but cozy, sanctum where a lost pilgrim finds his way home.