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Shining City': a ghost of its own potential

By Jenn McKee

Jamie Richards is haunted in the Who Wants Cake? production of Conor McPherson's "Shining City" at The Ringwald. Photo: Colleen Scribner.


Plays, by their very nature, are usually more about what's said than about action; and a play about a person who's in therapy is especially likely to be "talky." So how do you keep a show from being visually static?
That's ultimately the question haunting Who Wants Cake?'s inert production of Conor McPherson's "Shining City."
Set in Dublin, the Tony Award-nominated play has a dual structure, so that we hear a newly-minted widower, John (Joe Bailey), narrate the story of being haunted by his estranged wife in their home – to such a degree that he's moved into a B&B – to a therapist named Ian (Jamie Richards); and we see Ian, a former seminary student, struggling to leave the woman (Cassandra McCarthy) who just had his child, and staring down a crisis of existential loneliness and sexuality with a male prostitute (Matthew Turner Shelton).
Clearly, John's experience is intended as a filter through which we view Ian's unraveling, slowly leading the audience to the play's surprise ending.
But on opening night, McPherson's gut-punch conclusion was undercut by way of the lights not going down on cue, leaving Richards no choice but to finally break character and wave the other actors back on-stage for a curtain call.
Yes, this is something that probably won't happen again during the play's run. But in a way, it was an appropriate end to a flawed production.
Director Jamie Warrow has some elements working in her favor – Bailey does nice work with McPherson's distinctive pauses and stop-and-start speech patterns, and she tells John's tale well – but the overall show feels painfully sluggish.
Partly, this stems from the fact that in the therapy scenes, John and Ian remain seated throughout, thereby giving the audience little to nothing to watch while listening to the actors speak. There's just not a lot of modulation in tone or visuals happening. And the play's two hour running time drags without an intermission.
Also, while economics may dictate that the actors do the scene changes – and the Ringwald's stage layout means these changes must be done in low light – the choice really detracts from an intense play like "Shining City." For immediately after watching characters work through a highly emotional scene, you see them packing books and moving furniture, thereby yanking you out of the play's quietly menacing world.
However, a production element that puts you more firmly in McPherson's world is the actors' employment of Irish dialect – an effectively light, suggestive version of the real thing – and Warrow's set design, which evokes Ian's low-rent office, complete with a random hodgepodge of cheap furniture.
Much of the acting is fine, too. But what ultimately drives ghost stories is suspense – a sense of narrative momentum. True, McPherson's "Shining City" is more subtle (perhaps too subtle at times) and sophisticated than most campfire ghost stories; but that means its demands for a creative staging are all the higher. Unfortunately, WWC's production, on opening night, seemed merely a specter of what it could have been.

REVIEW:
'Shining City'
Who Wants Cake, The Ringwald Theatre, 22742 Woodward Ave., Ferndale. Saturday-Monday through Nov. 8. $10-$20. 248-545-5545.http://www.whowantscaketheatre.com

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