WHAT we do at the plays of Conor McPherson is listen to stories, long narratives meant to enthrall us by their narrative power. Now playing at Primary Stages is McPherson’s “This Lime Tree Bower,” a short play of three intersecting monologues delivered by three actors aware of and reacting to – minimally – each oth-er’s words.
Long monologues, with one actor talking and two others frozen in listening attitudes, need electric acting and tense direction to work. Here, Harris Yulin’s direction merely accentuates the static structure of the material, and the acting is uneven.
This play’s narrators do not trespass into the realms of the weird. The events they are recalling – from years later, it seems – are merely sad, ordinary and funny. Two brothers and the boyfriend of their sister re-create some incidents in a dingy seaside town near Dublin in the winter “with no one about.”
Young Joe was 17, shy, inexperienced in but obsessed by sex. He made a new friend at school – the (unseen) Damien, a classic bad boy who came from a broken home and knew lots of girls. Bewitched by Damien’s outlaw ways, Joe took to tagging along with him, first to play hooky, then to go to clubs. T.R. Knight gets just right the wide-eyed innocence of a nice kid in the grip of a strong personality. He conjures up, too, the poet trapped in Joe.
Joe’s older brother Frank helps out their dad in the family’s fish-and-chips shop and broods about ways to free dad from an indebtedness to a local bookie. Frank, played without vividness or definition by a miscast Thomas Lyons, comes up with a scheme for an armed robbery caper, which goes wrong in predictable ways before succeeding in even more improbable ways.
The third narrator is Ray, a young philosophy lecturer given to seducing and ditching female students and other local women. Ray is a self-loathing, alcoholic jerk whose stories seems to end with him colorfully vomiting. Drew McVety, in patched tweeds, glasses and tie, and looking a bit like William Hurt, is a believable academic type – sour, jealous, selfish, cynical.
But the play belongs to young Joe, a poet and dreamer stuck in a lifeless place, a down-market version of Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus. And in his narrative’s most haunting moments, he finds out how treacherous life is – he’s betrayed by his adored Damien. As with other McPherson works, “Lime Tree Bower” is less than the sum of its parts.
