Theater review: The Seafarer

by Arnold Wayne Jones of Dallas Voice

If you believe the current spate of Irish playwrights, life on the Emerald Isle is a bastion of boredom, where whisky-soaked conversations center around such esoterica as where the gay pickup capital of Ireland is located… and whether that should matter to a bunch of straight men in the first place. It’s enough to make you long for something — anything — to happen and shake things up.

Well, maybe not anything.

Sharky (Matthew Stephen Tompkins) has returned to his brother’s small coastal house to care for him following an accident that left him blind. It hardly seems like a big deal: The brother, Richard (Jim Covault), has spent most of his life blind drunk, so actually sightlessness seems almost incidental. The trauma has left him a petulant sot, bullying Sharky with self-pity and sniping.

But Richard’s harping is nothing compared to what Mr. Lockhart (Jerry Russell), a newcomer in town, asks of him. Sharkey made a deal with Lockhart 25 years ago to spare his life, and now it’s time to pay up with his soul. But the devil is a sporting chap, and agrees to a poker hand to settle the wager. He’s a cheater, but still.

Notwithstanding its otherworldliness, Conor McPherson’s The Seafarer — now playing at Stage West in Fort Worth under the always-deft direction of Rene Moreno — is a fairly traditional piece of drama — A Doll’s House focused through the prism of Faust: A character is forced to confront his shady past, which threatens his present and future.

Blending supernatural elements with the fiercely prosaic quality of a domestic drama is walking a razor’s edge, and The Seafarer never seems to find its focus. For much of the time, its fetishizing of alcoholism makes it seem like a brogue-filled version of The Lost Weekend; only as Act 1 draws to a close does it glimpse into hell.

But if anyone can convince you that Satan likes to pound one back with the lads, it’s Russell, who effortlessly convinces you that anything is possible. His sinister smile belying a commanding silence, Russell really sells the hoodoo and hokum. He’s ably matched by the burly, brooding, charismatic Tompkins, who hasn’t been seen on North Texas stages in far too long. Excellent comedic relief is skillfully provided by Covault and Chuck Huber as unrepentant drunks.

Among the tight cast, only Chris Hauge fumbles. His accent is less Irish Coast than Irish Spring — at least until he has to yell or talk fast, in which case all pretense of a dialect disappears completely. He moves with weirdly awkward mannerisms, and badly flubbed several lines on opening night. He could take a lesson from Russell, who time and again looks as comfortable in front of an audience as a pair of worn slippers. And that’s no blarney.