dublin carol...

Last night, Heidi and I trekked out to Steppenwolf to see William Petersen (of CSI fame) put on an Irish accent in Dublin Carol. We were in the very last row of the "Upstairs" theater, but it was smaller than the downstairs theater, so the last row is not as bad as it sounds. Only tickets I could get, too.

The show was, well, yeah. Short, 80 minutes, no intermission. Cast was small - Petersen's character John (I think - I didn't get a playbill until we left so I didn't read it till later), an almost recovering alcoholic estranged from his family and now working at a funeral home, Mark, the 20 year old nephew of Noel, the owner of the funeral home (in the hospital, so much discussed but never seen), and Mary, John's daughter, who came to visit to tell him that Helen, her mother, his wife, was dying in the hospital. The play basically told his story -- drank to escape from himself, ruined his life, his children's lives, his wife's life, had an affair, hit rock bottom, was rescued by Noel, in an act of kindness. He was offered the job in the funeral home and a second chance at life. It was a show about making connections with people - John with Noel, and then with Mark, and then with his daughter. There was never any big huge revelation, it was a quiet, introspective drama, with quite a few laughs. It ended rather abruptly and left me with a kind of "oh" feeling. I wanted to know what happened next, and it offered more questions than answers, a hopeful and optimistic but ratehr vague ending to the story.

One of my favorite lines was about an advent calendar - John thought that perhaps they should make a year 'round one, you open the little window and you get words of wisdom, advice, some jokes, maybe... as in "November - you're being a spazz, cop onto yourself" which let's face it, could be words of advice for me, personally every day of the year...