Actor Richard Coppinger has long been a mainstay of Stageworks' seasons, turning in admirable work in everything from Ionesco's The Chairs to Beckett's Godot and Bryony Lavery's Frozen. But in Shining City, the beautiful, deeply moving work by Conor McPherson, he gives the performance of his life, a lovingly detailed, heart-rendingly honest portrait of a middle-aged man drowning in a sea of quiet desperation.
Coppinger's character, John, can't do anything right: His attempts at an affair lead him to embarrassment and regret, and he can't even go to a brothel without missing the prostitute, losing his down payment, and getting punched in the stomach by a regretful bouncer. This is a sad character and a funny one, and Coppinger finds every note of John's paradoxical existence — his longing, his self-hatred, his anxiety and his silliness. "Nothing is ever like anyone expects, is it, you know?" he asks plaintively. "Like it's not a fairy tale."
As played stunningly by Coppinger, John is Everyman (and woman), every confused, uncertain human who ever fumbled a grand occasion, failed to accomplish a dream, aimed for satisfaction but only managed foolishness. He's the man Adrienne Rich wrote about in Diving Into the Wreck: "the thing itself and not the myth." He's rich only in regret.
Most of all, John regrets that his wife has died — the wife whom he mistreated at the nadir of his fortunes — and if he thinks he's seen her ghost, he's not quite sure that the haunting isn't one he deserves. In order to solve this dismaying problem, he goes to analyst Ian, a well-meaning healer who amiably encourages his new patient to speak frankly of his fears and visions. But in the play's second scene, we learn that Ian too is no paragon: He's the profoundly troubled partner of a woman who's borne his child, and with whom he now wants, for reasons he can't himself fully understand, to break off the relationship.
As Shining City progresses, we see that Ian, like John, like Ian's baffled lover Neasa, is caught up in the unexpectedness, the unwieldiness of real life, and that no one knows life's code, the lock's combination, the secret handshake. Surprising as it may seem, this pageant of human confusion is encouraging: Watching these haltingly hopeful characters engage with stubborn reality, we're reassured that our own struggles aren't some idiosyncratic exception. I've said that Shining City is funny — hilarious on a few occasions — but let me add that it's also profoundly meaningful and illuminating. This is the sort of play you remember for years.
Brilliantly directed by Anna Brennen, the play offers three superb performances besides Coppinger's. As Ian, Glenn Gover is an almost painfully sensitive creature, one who sincerely wants to be a help to John, but who can just barely manage the occasionally upbeat, therapeutic word with which to encourage his new patient. In his scene with his spurned lover, he's not the least bit cruel or imperious: He insists convincingly that he'll somehow continue to look after her and her child, and he admits, with the greatest difficulty, that his mistake was to think his link with Neasa "was the end of the journey for me — and it wasn't."
As Neasa, Dahlia Legault (who was so intriguing in Bobby and The Chimps at USF just a few weeks ago) is a formidable, clever woman whose intelligence just can't help her find a way around Ian's will to leave. Whether alerting Ian to the existence of a rival or literally throwing herself at his feet and pleading with him, the always-unpredictable Legault grabs our attention and never lets go. And as the man who may offer a solution to Ian's problems, Slake Counts is a walking contradiction, tough and tender, pragmatic and philosophical, possibly a danger to Ian or perhaps a refuge.
On Tandy Ecenia's attractive modern set, representing the therapist's office in which all the encounters occur, these characters, aptly costumed by Amy Cianci, do little and say much — and there's not a word you dare to miss. Creating just the right wistful and occasionally mysterious atmosphere is Karla Hartley's fine lighting and sound design. In sum, there's not a weakness in the show.
The gap between the real and the ideal has often been a theme of written literature — I think of Conrad's Youth and Flaubert's Madame Bovary as just two examples — but it hasn't been developed as thoroughly in the theater as in the novel. Shining City is a shining look at this opposition, one that's poignant and wise and supremely comic. I can't remember another recent play that searches so deeply into the odd shape of living experience. Or one that finds so much genuine humor in the sad, mad contours of our search for happiness.
