DOWN THE SHORE
Fresh from his stunning New York success–remounting Scott McPherson’s Marvin’s Room–David Petrarca has returned to direct a very different kind of play: Tom Donaghy’s Down the Shore. Where McPherson deftly mixed comedy with barely repressed sadness to create a work that literally had its audience laughing and crying at once, Down the Shore is much colder and crueler, about people far more emotionally stunted than those who populate Marvin’s Room–characters alienated from themselves and totally incapable of empathizing with others.
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This may not sound particularly interesting. It wasn’t. Donaghy never gives his audience a chance to get to know, much less like, his prickly, defensive characters. That kind of understanding is always a challenge in theater, but Donaghy makes it much harder than it has to be by inventing a bogus hybrid English for his play.
Unfortunately, Donaghy’s new theatrical language is far from finished. True, he does manage a clever line or two of slangy English, my favorite being Luke’s put-down: “This music makes my teeth hurt.” However, I saw enough totally confused audience members, and just as many totally uninterested ones, during the show to convince me that Donaghy has not yet succeeded in forging a new theatrical language out of the ignorant grunts and ungrammatical mutterings of postliterate America.
As the Da, John McDonnell captures well the charm and grace of the writer’s bighearted but foolish and incredibly gauche father. With his beaming smile, sparkling wink, and jiglike walk, McDonnell seems every inch the big lovable Irish peasant. Christine Benk has a much smaller role as the likable slattern the Yellow Peril, yet her five minutes onstage are worth an hour from almost anyone else here.
