Theater Review Actor d’Arcy fleshes out McPherson’s ‘Good Thief’

By Joseph Hurley

THE GOOD THIEF, by Conor McPherson. Directed by Carl Forsman. Starring Brian d’Arcy James. The Keen Company. At the Jose Quintero Theater, 534 W. 42nd St., NYC. Through March 25.

The usual question that arises when a new play by the astonishingly prolific young Dublin playwright Conor McPherson surfaces has to do with whether he can write a conventional play in which the characters actually engage in conversation.

Of course he can, and he proved it in "The Weir" and "This Lime Tree Bower," which ran, respectively, on Broadway and off a couple of seasons ago, and, by report, in "A Dublin Carol," a new three-actor play that has been seen in London and Dublin but not yet in New York.

The question doesn’t really apply to "The Good Thief," a 65-minute monologue that McPherson wrote in 1994, when he was just 23, and which is only now receiving its local debut production, an exceedingly secure one, as it happens, with actor Brian d’Arcy James directed by Carl Forsman.

When this particular text was first performed, at Dublin’s City Arts Centre on April 18, 1994, it was titled "The Light of Jesus," which might indicate that McPherson, who directed that first production, had a subtler, deeper agenda in mind than a casual exposure to the material can provide.

In an introduction to a volume of his plays, McPherson writes that he changed the title because a cousin of his, a professional actor named Garrett Keogh who was doing the play in the fall of 1994 at the Dublin Theatre Festival, told him no one would pay money to see a play called "The Light of Jesus," which caused him to revert to "The Good Thief," a title he’d had in mind during the writing period.

In the play, a nameless Dublin lowlife, a self-described "paid thug," specializes in frightening people on assignment from his employer, a petty gangland boss and publican named Joe Murray, roughing them up, and, upon occasion, shooting them.

The "thug" suffers from a strikingly low self-image, intensified, at least in part, by the fact that his former girlfriend, Greta, about whom he still obsesses, has left him and is currently living with Murray.

He despises his "craft," feeling generally inadequate, and loathing people around him, particularly "people with skills who can do stuff."

McPherson’s skill, even in his early 20s, was of such an acuity that he was able, as he is now, to make an audience cling to every syllable of a yarn that, in the hands of a lesser writer, wouldn’t be believed for a moment. In "St. Nicholas," which came along in 1997, he made audiences on both sides of the Atlantic go along with a tale of a Dublin drama critic who falls in with a gaggle of London vampires.

In "The Good Thief," the unnamed thug simply relates the story of his unpromising life, with particular concentration on one task he performed, at the behest of Murray, as usual, that went horribly wrong and nearly cost him his life, when one of his employer’s enemies got in between him and the object of his intimidation.

He could be sitting in a pub telling you the story of a TV movie of the week he’d seen the previous night, since the story is and of itself is about that level of complexity and inherent interest, but coming from actor James, it becomes compulsive and magnetic.

James, who initially garnered attention for his portrayal of the lovesick stoker in the Broadway musical "Titanic," and last season played the male lead in another musical, Andrew Lippa’s off-Broadway version of "The Wild Party" at Manhattan Theatre Club, has totally, almost eerily, transformed himself for the purposes of "The Good Thief."

Gone is the slick image of the romantic leading man in musicals, and in its stead the stubbly, aggressive, relentlessly dangerous aura of a conscienceless miscreant, someone vaguely deranged, and most definitely an individual you wouldn’t want to encounter in an unlighted urban alleyway.

At the same time, due to the sharpness both of McPherson’s remarkable ability to make simple-seeming sentences resonate, and James’s uncanny ability to make part of this unsavory character strangely poignant, even sympathetic, the audience remains glued to the story until the teller’s final phrase, "I was trying to get out of the rain."

Using only a chair made of cast metal placed against a flat, dull, backdrop through which a sky filled with stars can sometimes be seen, the actor, wearing a battered wool sweater over a pair of worn slacks, ostensibly the thug’s work outfit, delivers an unforgettable, utterly riveting performance, the equal and more of just about anything available on any New York stage at the moment.