Spirits That Haunt an Irish Writer
Alcohol, the Church and Ghosts Inform Conor McPherson's Plays

By Nelson Pressley
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, November 11, 2007

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.")

Joy Zinoman, who is directing "Shining City" at her Studio Theatre, describes that play's issues: "One man has had a metaphysical experience, the other has lost his faith." She and the playwright both characterize it as unexpectedly funny, Zinoman says that when the subplots branch into the men's personal lives, "There are two completely parallel stories going on, and they impact each other though they never intersect."

These are the elements that have made McPherson enough of a brand name that he is stopped for autographs outside the Booth Theatre, where "The Seafarer" is playing in the National Theatre production he directed in London last year. Jim Norton and Conleth Hill are reprising their acclaimed turns, and the cast -- including Ciaran Hinds as the visitor and David Morse as his prey -- figures to be considered when next spring's Tony nominations are sorted out.

Yet the plays are progressing. If "Shining City" continues edging away from the monologues that marked McPherson's initial style and more toward dialogue, the trend is further amplified in "The Seafarer." At nearly 2 1/2 hours, the newer play is his longest yet (his first with an intermission), and it even offers glimmers of hope.

"A lot of plays I would write," McPherson says, "I'd follow the depression into the depths and right on down to hell. That was fine with me. But with this one, no. Maybe there's a kind of maturity, or sump'n like that."

Maybe. The wiry redhead seems thoroughly composed, even when scarfing a sandwich in a shabby room upstairs in the Booth. He's scrambling to make the opening of Tom Stoppard's "Rock 'n' Roll" down the street, in part because it stars his friend Brian Cox, who helped solidify McPherson's budding reputation a decade ago by agreeing to be in the one-man "St. Nicholas." That engrossing saga of a drama critic who becomes involved with vampires turned into a hit for both men on each side of the Atlantic.

Coming to the Studio for "Shining City" breaks a long-standing pattern of never watching his own works once he's done with them. It's a bit of writerly self-doubt that he'd like to purge: "This is like a conscious effort on my part, trying to change my ways a little bit," says McPherson, adding: "I hope I'm not in agony."

That sensitivity extends to his reading habits, which pointedly don't include fiction -- it reminds him too much of what he calls his own "pain" of writing. But the nonfiction he reads seems to be fodder enough. Quantum physics was the topic when he got snagged on that phantom sixth sense, interested in layman's stuff about the implausibility of nothingness in the universe and the uncertainty of whether matter is particles or waves of energy.

"So," he says, sounding a bit like one of his lucid, bedeviled characters, "if everything is just energy vibrating at different frequencies and that's what we are as well, then of course we can have telepathy and see ghosts and see into the past. Of course we can. What's so weird about that? It's probably more than possible."