“The Night Alive” playing at Curtain Call Theatre through November 7, is a wonderful character study of a man who by society’s definition is a loser. He is slothful, dirty, unreliable and not very trustworthy.
One night in a park in Dublin, the loner, Tommy, sees a young woman being beaten by a man and uncharacteristically intervenes and brings Aimee back home to his filthy flat. Later he is to learn she is a part time prostitute and the man beating her was her psychotic boyfriend. And even more unusual for the pair, they form a bond that transforms them.
It’s a darkly comic work that is on one level a play about misfits bonding to survive in a world in which they are invisible, but at its heart “The Night Alive” is an almost spiritual play about redemption.
Thanks to a marvelous performance by Chris Foster, the work becomes an allegory about man’s futility in his search to find a place in the universe. Foster crafts a penetrating portrait of a man who is adrift in world to which he created.
Tommy’s past is sullied and his future bleak. His only friend Doc – whom he is willing to cheat - is described as a person whose mind is always 5-10 minutes behind everyone else. Yet, somehow Foster creates a man who is larger than the sum of his parts so eventually we care and hope that something good happens to him. One of the beautiful ironies in the play is we are never sure that Aimee is that good thing.
Though written in 2013, “The Night Alive” would have been right at home in the 1960s alongside the plays of John Osbourne, Harold Pinter and certainly Joe Orton. Indeed as the characters Tommy and Doc open the play with some comical word play you either wait for the entrance of Godot, or laugh while recalling fond memories of the Monty Python gang.
The existentialist tone of the play does cause some problems. Director Carol Max is comfortable with the storytelling skills of the playwright which drives the play. But since the characters are meant to be more than real people the direction seems to be cautious about that aspect of the work thus confusing the intent of the playwright.
One case is Patrick White’s portray of Doc. White is effective as the child-like Doc as he borders the line between innocence and annoying. However, since it is Doc who speaks for the play’s larger themes when he expounds on time waves, black holes and their links to higher powers in such a wise, intelligent and comprehending way, it seems he’s dropped character and become someone else. Lost is the intuitive nature of individuals who are without guile.
John Noble as Maurice is able to show his shifts in personality with a natural ease. He is churlish as Tommy’s uncle who owns the house they live in and also is believable as the sentimental widower who drunkenly reveals his feelings of guilt about his wife’s accidental death. If Maurice is McPherson’s stand-in for God, Noble brings a solidly Irish portrayal to the deity.
Most disappointing is Aimme. McPherson rarely creates fully developed women in his plays and Aimme is no exception. Played by Elizabeth Pietrangelo in a totally passive fashion, she is believable as an abused woman who lacks identity and personality. But as the redemptive figure who changes Tommy’s life, there needs to be more spark and charisma.
As for Kenneth, who is either Aimme’s ex or current boyfriend, the character seems to exist solely to change to mood of the play and to represent the evil that exists outside the sterile universe of Tommy’s world. Played by Alex Perone he’s a really bad guy and a thug. Missing is the ominous purpose of the character.
“The Night Alive” is a bold choice for a local theater company as it is a play that tends to be uncomfortable in a very good way.
“The Night Alive” at Curtain Call Theatre, Latham. Through November 7. Perfomances 7:30 p.m. Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays, 3 p.m. Sundays. 877-7529.
Bob Goepfert is the arts editor for the Troy Record.
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