|
|
|
Petersen translates
to stage in 'Dublin Carol'
Providence audiences discovered something delightful this week; that you don't need forensic evidence to discover that TV star William Petersen can actually act with the best of them. And the former stage actor, well, he rediscovered himself. Petersen, who for several high wattage years has played Gil Grissom, the main star of the CBS mega-hit "C.S.I. - Crime Scene Investigation," is also a good friend of Trinity Repertory Company's artistic director Curt Columbus. Columbus asked Petersen to take a break from being the country's most famous lead murder case forensic scientist - a character with a limited personality range who somehow started a cottage industry - to tackle head on Conor McPherson's pitiable paean to an Irish alcoholic's mid-life crisis, "Dublin Carol." The only DNA expected here is Doubling Nightly Audiences. Petersen's acting pedigree - gleaned from a decade in the theater before his jaunt to financial security on a hit TV show - is on full display: the lost character's Irish brogue (at least 90 percent of the time, given the 10,000 words he has to utter), the quirks, the slouched posture, the halting mannerisms, the self-indulgent pity, the self-effacing notoriety. Petersen - who told various newspapers in several interviews he needed "to get back to stage work before he forgot how to do it" - needn't have fretted. In playwright McPherson's hard-hitting words, "It's like ridin' a (expletive) bicycle." "Dublin Carol" is an 80-minute character study of several rudderless souls and how easy it is for a typical Irishman to become an alcoholic in a society whose small towns unofficially condone nightly stops from pub to pub to pub in order to be "one of the lads." McPherson is a master of three-character, alcoholic plays: See "The Weir." While the playwright's language/dialogue seems effortless, flowing, almost invented on the spot, cheery and bleak simultaneously, and occasionally spellbinding, there is no ground-breaking plot or writing here, nothing truly new or ("CSI" notwithstanding) solved. Don't expect insights into your lives; rather only insights into what's left of John's, Petersen's troubled character. John Plunkett, on the verge of being a homeless bum after
abandoning his wife and two children and discovering the bottom of the
bottle, is saved by a kind mortician and asked to undertake undertaking.
We meet him mid-life in set designer Eugene Lee's scruffy, worn, hoary,
world-weary office, a match to John's demeanor.
|