The Night Alive
Opening Night: December 12, 2013
Closing: February 2, 2014
Theater: Atlantic Theater
Tommy’s not a bad man, he’s getting by. Renting a run-down room in his uncle Maurice’s house, just about keeping his ex-wife and kids at arm’s length and rolling from one get-rich-quick scheme to the other with his pal Doc. Then one day he comes to the aid of Aimee, who’s not had it easy herself, struggling through life the only way she knows how. Their past won’t let go easily. But together there’s a glimmer of hope they could make something more of their lives. Something extraordinary. Perhaps.
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December 12, 2013
Something bright and beautiful pulses in the shadows of The Night Alive, the extraordinary new play by Conor McPherson that opened on Thursday night in a Donmar Warehouse production imported from London by the Atlantic Theater Company. I do not use the word extraordinary simply as a critic tacking on a blurb-friendly adjective. Mr. McPherson, the Irish dramatist who gave us The Weir and Shining City, has a singular gift for making the ordinary glow with an extra dimension, like a gentle phosphorescence waiting to be coaxed into radiance.
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December 12, 2013
Conor McPherson’s moody new drama, The Night Alive, focuses on two down-and-out Dubliners who meet by chance. Sweet, right? Not really. McPherson is a playwright who embraces life’s dark streaks and mysteries. He has gone there before many times, including in his ghostly dramas The Weir and Shining City. McPherson’s new work, which he directs, is intriguing and rich in atmosphere, but not on par with the earlier works.
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December 12, 2013
The dangerous sparks emitted when a lonely, luckless man is drawn to a bad-news woman might seem like well-worn dramatic terrain. But in the hands of Conor McPherson that encounter yields developments that are funny, melancholy, frightening and ultimately affecting. While supernatural dread has often coursed through the veins of this uncommonly gifted Irish playwright’s work, in The Night Alive the menace of physical and emotional violence is all-too-human, as is the whisper of redemption that follows. Arriving Off Broadway in a beautifully acted production from London’s Donmar Warehouse, directed by McPherson and starring Ciaran Hinds, this is a captivating play rich in tenderness.
READ THE REVIEWDecember 12, 2013
You might not guess it by looking at him, but Tommy, the protagonist of playwright/director Conor McPherson’s charming and chilling The Night Alive, is quite the gentleman. Sensitively portrayed by Ciarán Hinds in the Donmar Warehouse production that has just transferred, with its original cast, to the Atlantic Theater Company’s Linda Gross Theater, Tommy is hulking man with a large gut and a lumbering posture. His greasy hair and scraggy moustache are in as much need of tidying up as the cluttered mess of room he rents at his uncle’s Dublin house. (Great work by Soutra Gilmour on the unit set.)
READ THE REVIEWDecember 13, 2013
Conor McPherson’s The Night Alive, which opened on Thursday at the Atlantic Theater Co., is an oddly bisected play. The first half is a warm comedy about two people making a connection. Tommy (Ciarán Hinds), a burly middle-aged man, has rescued a young woman, Aimee (Caoilfhionn Dunne), from a beating by her boyfriend and brought her to his bed-sitter, a grubby basement apartment in a Dublin house owned by his uncle (Jim Norton), a lonely widower.
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