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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for December 13, 2013

TT: Two solitudes

December 13, 2013 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal I have nothing but good things to say about two plays by Conor McPherson, the New York premiere of The Night Alive and a Chicago revival of Port Authority. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
Conor McPherson’s “The Seafarer,” the best new play I’ve seen in the past decade, transferred from London to Broadway in 2007 and has since been done all over America. Now Mr. McPherson has returned to New York with another play on a closely related theme. Like “The Seafarer” before it, “The Night Alive” is an agonizingly black Christmastide tale of poverty, despair and transcendence that ends with a sharp twist–and it, too, is a stunner.
The-Night-Alive-118.jpgIn his “Letters to a Young Poet,” Rainer Maria Rilke spoke of “the love that consists in this: that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other.” I thought of Rilke’s words as I watched “The Night Alive,” whose two central characters, trapped in their twin solitudes, struggle to bridge the yawning gap that separates them. Tommy (Ciarán Hinds), a fiftysomething failure who lives in one grubby room of a Dublin house owned by the disapproving uncle (Jim Norton) who raised him, picks up Aimee (Caoilfhionn Dunne), a sometime prostitute in her late twenties, after she gets into a brawl with her sinister boyfriend (Brian Gleeson). Both of them appear to have given up on life, yet they reach out to one another–slowly, haltingly–across the canyon of hopelessness to which the equally lonely Uncle Maurice gives voice: “You’re just knocking the days off the calendar. There’s even days when Mass just takes you nowhere, just deposits you back on the pavement, just another invisible man, knowing that the end is sneaking in on you and knowing it’s gonna be the worst part of your life.”
You’ve seen this plot before, more or less, and there are few surprises in Mr. McPherson’s iteration save for the very last scene, which adds a quiet note of mystery to the proceedings. The beauty is in the telling, which is so fresh and full of coarsely vital poetry that you’ll cling to every word, and in the acting, which is worthy of the script….
“Port Authority,” a three-man play from 2001 in which Mr. McPherson weaves together a set of parallel monologues about love and disappointment, has just received a flawless revival out in Chicagoland. Directed by William Brown, who staged Writers’ Theatre’s frenziedly funny production of David Ives’ “The Liar” earlier this year, “Port Authority” is being mounted in the smaller of the company’s two houses, a 56-seat black-box theater located in the back room of a suburban bookstore. Mr. Brown’s trio of Chicago-based actors (Patrick Clear, Rob Fenton, and John Hoogenakker) is identical in quality to the ones, Mr. Norton among them, who appeared to impressive effect in the play’s U.S. premiere at the Atlantic Theater Company in 2008….
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Read the whole thing here.
The trailer for the Writers’ Theatre revival of Port Authority:

TT: Lift up your hearts

December 13, 2013 by Terry Teachout

1220121016.jpgOnce I thought that Christmas was, like the song says, the most wonderful time of the year. Then, eighteen years ago today, my closest friend died, painfully and pointlessly, and for a long time afterward I found it impossible to rejoice at Christmas. I went through the motions, but there was a hole in my heart.

Ten years later, almost to the day, I was hospitalized with congestive heart failure. By a coincidence at which I would surely have turned up my nose had I encountered it on stage, I fell in love with Mrs. T at the very same moment. We’ve been together ever since.

I suppose the holiday season can never mean the same thing to a middle-aged man that it does to an innocent, unknowing child. For a decade it meant death to me. Now it means life, hope, and gratitude–which is, needless to say, what it’s supposed to mean. The hole in my heart has healed, and I now know myself to be the luckiest person imaginable, blessed beyond measure with a loving companion, true friends, and a fulfilling career.

Would that my old friend had lived to see and share my good fortune. May all of you be so fortunate, today and always.

TT: Almanac

December 13, 2013 by Terry Teachout

“Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.”
Jorge Luis Borges, “The Threatened”

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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