The Night Alive

Atlantic Theater Co., New York City

(866) 811-4111

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Conor McPherson “has a singular gift for making the ordinary glow with an extra dimension,” said Ben Brantley in The New York Times. In the Irish playwright’s latest comic drama, that luminescence takes a while to break through the “murk and squalor” of the setting. In a garbage-strewn Dublin apartment, the action begins when the flat’s slovenly middle-aged tenant returns from an errand accompanied by a young prostitute who’s suffered a beating. But in the scenes that follow, the play frequently “ascends to a plane that can only be called transcendent.” The Night Alive, directed by McPherson “with an auteur’s thoroughness of vision,” wrings redemption from the ugliest of circumstances.

Though McPherson doesn’t valorize any of his mistake-prone characters, “he takes their dreams and deficiencies seriously,” said Jesse Green in New York magazine. From the start, the audience feels invested in the fates of Tommy and Aimee, who are essentially scruffy, impoverished iterations of the classic brooding hero and damsel in distress. “Any condescension in performance or even design would sink this material,” of course, but the performers who eventually fill out the cast of five prove to be “vigorous advocates for their characters’ dignity.” That’s true even of Michael McElhatton, who plays Tommy’s idiot friend, but it’s especially true of Ciarán Hinds: “His Tommy is a complete creation,” and as this unlikely hero attempts to protect Aimee, he reveals wells of moral courage.

But even Hinds can’t bridge the disparate halves of this “oddly bisected play,” said Robert Feldberg in the Bergen County, N.J., Record. When Aimee’s abusive pimp and boyfriend arrives on the scene, McPherson’s gently comic story of two lost souls abruptly veers toward extreme violence, and the playwright never again finds a credible tone. The ending itself is touching but not convincing, said Terry Teachout in The Wall Street Journal. But that feeling of mild disappointment “only makes me want to see the play again in a different production,” because work of this quality only gets better with repeated stagings. Plot barely matters. “The beauty is in the telling, which is so fresh and full of coarsely vital poetry that you’ll cling to every word.”