Spirits That Haunt an Irish Writer

Alcohol, the Church and Ghosts Inform Conor McPherson's Plays

NEW YORK -- Irish playwright Conor McPherson, says he's now a settled man, having sworn off drink after it nearly killed him in 2001 and having married a painter two years later. Yet his writing, while consciously moving toward what he calls more "traditional" patterns, still rings with lonely Dublin voices.

"Shining City," opening today at the Studio Theatre in its first major post-Broadway American staging (and with the 36-year-old playwright himself in attendance), is an agile ghost tale, with a widower visiting a therapist/lapsed priest because he keeps seeing his recently deceased wife.

And "The Seafarer," getting its U.S. premiere on Broadway (now in previews and opening Thursday), deals with a devilish figure who shows up for a high-stakes poker game on Christmas Eve. The alcohol level, as in "Dublin Carol," "This Lime Tree Bower" and "Rum and Vodka," is prodigious.

"Primarily it's there because it's what I knew growing up," McPherson says of the drinking, which in "The Seafarer" reaches an Olympian scale that Eugene O'Neill would appreciate. (He'd also recognize the linguistic repetitions, the moral scale, the author's empathy for his characters . . . and of course, the infernal hauntings.)

"In Ireland, when you're about 13 or 14, you start drinking, you know?" the playwright says. "By the time you're 15 or 16, you're probably drinking with the approval of your parents. And if you're unlucky, you sort of make it a bit of a career."

McPherson, who came to fame with the pub-fueled ghost stories of "The Weir" 10 years ago, counts himself lucky to have dropped the bottle. But in this and other matters, he is one spooked playwright. Listen as he explains his taste for the supernatural:

"Whatever's happening to the characters, it allows you to really test the boundaries of perception and reality," he says. "I always have this feeling that we know so little. We live on this planet, and we have six senses -- "

He catches himself. But he had to think twice.

There are two huge things McPherson has kicked in his life: liquor, and, much earlier, Catholicism, although you might not know it from his scripts. "Shining City" ripples with a religious presence, and "The Seafarer" is told within what McPherson calls "a Catholic framework."

"It's not a Catholic message or a Christian message," he clarifies. "I think it's a pagan one. But it just happens to be in the guise of Catholicism because that's the mysticism du jour of Irish people. And it is a very mystical kind of religion."

The highly entertaining alcoholic banter of "The Seafarer" has melancholy panache, and the play is deeply masculine -- five men, no women and no surprise there, since females are scarce in McPherson's oeuvre. (Although not for long: His next play, likely to surface in London, is an adaptation for two women and a man of Daphne du Maurier's "The Birds.")