'Closing Time': A Pub's Sad Demise

Keegan Plays It Cautious in Irish Drama

The road to Ireland's soul still snakes through the Irish pub in Owen McCafferty's "Closing Time," even though the play is in part a dirge for the neighborhood watering hole.

Can it be? Irish pubs in trouble? But the Celtic Tiger has passed some of the old taverns by, and you can watch one quietly fall apart in Keegan Theatre's sober production at Theatre on the Run in Arlington.

The "sober" part is a mixed blessing. This is a heavy drinking show, a long day's journey into night with all five characters hoisting glasses at epic rates. McCafferty, who has a knack for the dry sarcasm and sudden urgency of saloon chat, watches his people wreck themselves; the drama opens with two men passed out in the Belfast bar and the proprietress muttering a pungent opening line: "Smell this dump."

Curiously, though, the drinking doesn't have much effect on the acting. The flow of liquor ought to settle in like a stretch of ruinous weather, yet you never get that ripple of high spirits and tragedy as characters look to drown their sorrows in still one more glass. Instead, the ensemble, co-directed by Eric Lucas and Kerry Waters Lucas (married in real life, but philanderers in this show), works cautiously. They find the plain daylight sense of each character and stick to it.

If that doesn't quite push "Closing Time" to its expressive limits, it gets pretty far. Kerry Waters Lucas is wry and bitter as Vera, the proprietress who runs the place with her cipher of a husband, Robbie (the melancholy Bruce Rauscher). Vera's attraction to Iggy, the handsome layabout parked like a rock at one end of the bar, grows to proportions that the actress plays with the closest thing this show has to pitiful drunken abandon.

As Iggy, Eric Lucas is jittery and withdrawn, pulling himself extra pints on the sly and ducking his head whenever trouble looms. His most effective moments -- the ones that reveal how subtly annoying Iggy can be -- come in a long inquisitive scene with Ian LeValley's Joe, the well-heeled customer at the other end of the bar who conscientiously drops coins in the till for each vodka he pours himself.

LeValley delivers an alluring, complicated turn as Joe -- smiling and responsible, but nursing as much heartache as anyone. (He's also the biggest realist, which isn't saying much.) As Joe's story unfolds, McCafferty's themes of loss and avoidance begin to take shape, counterweighted with odd comments on the chugging economy outside this dank room.

Some of the newsy information done in voice-over between scenes is too distractingly current -- updates on Burma's disaster and on the Barack Obama-Hillary Clinton race. (For the record, the play was produced at the National Theatre in London six years ago.) Still, you get the gist: There's a bustling world beyond, and this decaying place is like an outdated emotional hideout.

That's certainly what it is for Alec, a brain-damaged man who was shot in the head by thugs in a case of mistaken identity. (Rough times in Belfast.) Played by Mark A. Rhea in the manner of Lennie in "Of Mice and Men," Alec is the opposite of a deus ex machina. He's McCafferty's wrecking ball, coming down on a place that the playwright ruins with deeply mixed emotions.

Closing Time, by Owen McCafferty. Directed by Eric Lucas and Kerry Waters Lucas. Set design, George Lucas and Eric Lucas; lighting and sound design, Dan Martin.

About 1 hour 50 minutes.

Through June 7 at Theatre on the Run, 3700 S. Four Mile Run Dr., Arlington. Call 703-892-0202 or visit http://www.keegantheatre.com.