The Seafarer

photo by Joan Marcus
play by Conor McPherson
Booth Theater

A friend raved in December about The Seafarer, someone I really trust with theater opinions, and I put it on my must-see list before it ends. I paid above my usual ticket budget to see it (I try not to pay above $20 for theater--I invented theater cheap), and while I'm not sorry--I'm not sure it was worth the big splurge. Previous splurges into barely discounted tickets have included Faith Healer and Frost/Nixon. Worth every penny and good even from bottom-of-the-barrel seats, I have no regrets on my spending. The Seafarer, however, was just below must-see. Good, but not full-price theater, for my ultra cheap heart.

After thinking about it for a few days, the play is probably based on the Anglo-Saxon poem, although I find it a loose and an almost meaningless connection if true. While it deals with some of the themes in the poem, it deals with them too loosely to be seriously considered, in my mind. Perhaps we can consider the poem a launching point, but not too much more.

Set on Christmas Eve, two brothers with no other family left end up with a full house in the evening (pun intended) and a high stakes Poker game ensues. Four locals and an increasingly drunk devil compete for money, while at the same time one of the men (Sharky) knows that he is actually playing the devil for his soul.

There was definitely a great deal of comedy in the play, but most of it was surprisingly cheap: bathroom humor, drunk jokes and a few shots of comedy because one of the brothers is blind. I laughed, heck, everyone did. But, it wasn't the satisfying laughter you leave the theater with.

Something doesn't have to be deep to be good. But, for me one standard of good is something that works on several different layers. There is a spectrum of layers, if you will. Like any spectrum it has extreme ends. If we were talking about movies, I suppose I would consider one end to be something akin to almost any Will Ferrell movie. I would think the other end would be, I don't know, Gandhi. This play was near the middle. It didn't strive into the deep ends and flirted with farce.

My friend saw the play in November or December and I can only believe at that time that it was still a little bit more alive than it was by mid-February. The actor that she said was the most amazing she'd ever seen wasn't "in the zone" and was going through the motions the night I saw it, hamming it up a bit for the audience, but most of the subtlety of the character had disappeared if it indeed existed a few months ago.

There was a theological element to it which normally attracts me. However, it was theologically a bit shallow with its main reference as the miracle of human life and God's love for dramatically imperfect humanity. There was also a little bit about the power of faith to repel the darker powers, say faith in God repelling the devil on Christmas Eve. From the poem by the sane name we have:

Fate is greater
and God is mightier
than any man's thought.

This seems about as deep as this one goes.

In summary, this isn't must see, but it's not so bad. I've been a bit spoiled lately and theater offerings have been very good pre-award season, so I'm perhaps a little pickier than normal. But, I wanted something very wonderful and I got good. Go, if it suits you (again pun intended, since this is a card game), but do your best to probably not pay more than you usually do.