'The Seafarer' Loses Its Grip On the Devil

As the ultimate repo man, the Devil would seem to have more than enough work on his hands these days. And yet, as Conor McPherson tells it, Old Scratch is not so busy collecting on the souls of the seriously reprehensible that he would give a pass to a pathetic debtor such as the grizzled boozer he tracks to a decrepit Irish bungalow in "The Seafarer."

In McPherson's flavorful fable, it is Christmas Eve in the slovenly cottage of the Harkin brothers -- crusty, sightless Richard (Floyd King) and dour, simmering Sharky (Billy Meleady) -- when the Prince of Darkness materializes. Appearing in the guise of a wealthy bon vivant named Mr. Lockhart (Philip Goodwin), Satan fixes a withering gaze on Sharky and, over a long night of ale and poker, plots the terrible settling with him of an old score.

The comedy-drama, receiving its Washington premiere at Studio Theatre, is so rich in detail -- especially in evoking the alcohol-assisted entropy of disheveled men and marginal lives -- that you can see past the dramatist's appropriation of some standard-issue pact-with-the-Devil plot devices. What's harder to overlook on this occasion is a feeling that director Paul Mullins has not adequately marshaled the considerable acting resources at his disposal. He allows mannered behavior to overtake some of the performances and the tension between the play's principal adversaries to dissipate.

Although this mounting of "Seafarer" gets many of the intended laughs -- courtesy especially of Edward Gero's very funny portrayal of Richard's eternally inebriated drinking mate, Ivan -- it stints on the terror. The chiller factor is missing, for instance, from one of the piece's nastiest interludes, Mr. Lockhart's goose-bump-raising description of what Hell is like -- a discourse that helps to explain the play's title:

"You're locked in a space that's smaller than a coffin, which is lying a thousand miles down just under the bed of an icy pitch-black sea," Lockhart tells Sharky. "You're buried alive in there, and it's so cold . . . your bones ache with a deep, perpetual agony."

And happy holidays to you, too! McPherson, many of whose plays ("The Weir," "Shining City") are filled with ghosts and ghost stories, often finds a poetic shimmer in things that go bump in the night. He's also adept at exploiting an Irish fascination with guilt and sin, and in "The Seafarer," his Mr. Lockhart serves up a portrait of eternal damnation out of both the most disturbing type of nightmare and the most terrifying Sunday sermon.

Goodwin, however, chooses the preachier route, declaiming the Devil's words rather than offering them in slier confidence, an approach that diminishes their nerve-fraying impact. Meleady, for his part, so internalizes the pain of the down-on-his-luck Sharky -- whose violent transgression many years earlier is the source of his satanic debt -- that an audience is not permitted the necessary access to his feelings. Somehow, the performance doesn't occupy enough space. Whether Sharky prevails in the drama's climactic contest seems here a matter of far too little consequence.

The holiday-making evoked in "The Seafarer" is by design of the sorriest sort. Sharky, having lost a job in the south of Ireland, has returned to the bump-in-the-road hamlet of Baldoyle, north of Dublin, to take care of Richard, blinded during an attempt at dumpster diving. Mostly, odoriferous Richard sits around, drinking and whining, as Ivan wanders the house in a whiskey haze, having misplaced his glasses as well as, apparently, his car.

Although some of the accents tend toward the broad, leprechaun variety, the dialogue illuminating the diminished capacity of these wasted men is often quite funny, as when King's Richard, his hair a tangled forest, demands to know where in the house Ivan spent the night.

"Did you sleep on the floor like a [bleeping] animal?" King asks.

"No," Gero replies indignantly. "I slept on the rug."

Their keen sense of timing is an asset, as is the presence of Jeff Allin, portraying Nicky, the local sport who brings Mr. Lockhart to the cottage -- and who also has stolen away Sharky's girl. (Again, though, the resentment welling up in Sharky over this matter never comes urgently to the surface.)

Set designer Russell Metheny's rendering of Richard's bungalow brings to mind one of those dark, untidy lairs of bachelors allergic to housekeeping; you can almost smell the decades of smoke and peat embedded in the torn sofas and worn rugs. Helen Huang, the costume designer, adds other layers of authenticity, in elements such as Richard's laughably flimsy winter coat and the cheap-looking chain around Nicky's neck.

Studio's "Seafarer" gets a lot of the production's embroidery right, even as it stumbles at the task of framing and enlarging the conflict at the heart of the play. Which only goes to show that the Devil is not always in the details.

The Seafarer, by Conor McPherson. Directed by Paul Mullins. Lighting, Michael Giannitti; sound, Neil McFadden; dialect coach, BettyAnn Leeseberg-Lange. About 2 1/2 hours. Through Feb. 22 at Studio Theatre, 1501 14th St. NW. Visit http://www.studiotheatre.org or call 202-332-3300.