Conor McPherson may have forsaken alcohol after his brush with the Grim Reaper, but his universe is still that of a pub-crawler down to his last euro, reliant on the grudging charity of family and friends. In this myth-infused underworld realm, demons wear steel-toed boots—the better for kicking the weak and helpless—while angels in blue jeans dispense grace in the form of back-alley cut-rate hand jobs for shamefaced men too timid to expect anything more. (This is Ireland, after all.)
At first sight in The Night Alive, Aimee (whose name is French for "Loved") appears to be no more than a teenage street waif rescued in the course of a beatdown from her rude-boy consort by an unlikely Samaritan on his way to the takeaway shop. Tommy is hardly the stuff of knightly heroes—a divorced father, he now lives with his widowed uncle Maurice in the latter's crumbling Edwardian mansion and works odd jobs with his slow-witted sidekick Doc. Little does he suspect that his intrusion into the affairs of this forlorn damsel in distress will disrupt the cosmic order in a manner eventually rewarding these three middle-aged lost boys in need of a Wendy.
The transformation is not easy. Maurice still mourns the loss of his wife three years earlier, his grief expressed in bouts of whiskey-soaked guilt and fury. Doc is a couch-surfing sadsack given to musing on intergalactic boundaries. Tommy is probably the healthiest of the trio, being crippled only by his own apathy, but hardly a week will go by before each will display courage and initiative in small acts of daring which, in turn, will draw them forth from spiritual inertia, even to making plans for a hitherto-inconceivable future.
Under Henry Wishcamper's intuitive direction, Francis Guinan, Steppenwolf's go-to representative of sensitive masculinity, and Tim Hopper, in an amazing departure from his Russian Transport slimeball, swap repartee with tag-team precision as codependent chums Tommy and Doc, while veteran heavy M. Emmet Walsh is a formidable stage presence as the blustering Maurice. Helen Sadler hints at the strategic guidance lying beneath Aimee's passive veneer, as Dan Waller conveys menace as a sadistic bully who ultimately gets what he deserves. It makes no difference that we've met these characters in other McPherson plays (notably, The Seafarer). Whether Dublin's scruffy fates move in mysterious ways or with Dickensian resolve, salvation is always welcome—whenever or however it arrives.
