St Nicholas @ Undermain Theatre
Bruce Dubose; photo credit Evan Michael Woods
—Jill Farrington Sweeney
It’s almost too easy a target for a playwright: the theater critic as soul-sucking monster. Admittedly, the critic at issue here is a more metaphorical one than the play’s other more literal monsters. Irish playwright Conor McPherson’s St. Nicholas is part fairy-tale, part-campfire story, with a hefty dash of the sort of blarney you’d expect from the drunk at the end of the bar intent on bending your ear with his life’s story. One-man shows are notoriously difficult needles to thread—one guy, talking for ninety minutes straight? But in the capable hands of Undermain Theatre’s Artistic Director Bruce DuBose, returning to the part he first played for Undermain in 2001 (and directing the piece as well), the tale of one monster meeting another captivates.
St. Nicholas spins a yarn about an unnamed Irish theater critic. Past his prime, unhappy at home and at work, and filled with loathing for himself and everyone around him, the critic becomes obsessed with a young actress he follows to London in a drunken haze. There, after humiliating himself in front of the young woman, he meets an unnaturally charismatic vampire and agrees to procure victims for him and the rest of his nest of bloodsuckers--in exchange for room and board and an infusion of vampiric charm. By play’s end, it’s a toss-up as to who’s the true vampire of the piece. A meditation on fear certainly—of aging and loss of power, even of the loss of one’s humanity—but perhaps above all else an examination of the power and the pleasure of a good story, well-told.
Dubose’s critic is splendidly gone to seed, a huckster who sees his own flaws clearly without ever seeking to truly correct them. In lesser hands, the character might feel like little more than middle-aged white male pontification with the bonus of a soothing Irish brogue. He’s his own sort of vampire, feeding off the talent and vitality of those around him during his younger days as a critic, with no real thoughts or opinions of his own. But DuBose manages to find the charm and the pathos of the character without ever forgiving or forgetting his flaws. DuBose also portrays the few other characters of the piece—particularly Helen, the young actress who obsesses him, some of her fellow actors, and William, the charming if dour vampire who seduces the critic—with specificity, but a light hand. Even in the few moments where the critic crosses the line from flawed into something more sinister—hovering lustily over the young actress as she sleeps may hit audiences a little differently now than when the play was first produced—DuBose always manages to reel the audience back in.
A filmed version of the piece, still starring DuBose and directed by Blake Hackler, was streamed last season to great and well-deserved acclaim. This live production, directed by DuBose, naturally offers more freedom for DuBose to move through the world onstage and define each space as the story progresses—a crowded pub, the critic’s study, the garden behind the vampires’ nest—which DuBose handles with aplomb. There seems to have been a deliberate artistic choice to avoid using lighting cues to help define spaces prior to the supernatural elements of the piece come into play, which makes the action of the first half of the piece feel a little muddied at times. But this is hardly Mr. DuBose’s first rodeo—the audience starts and ends in the palm of his hand. During this much-hyped “spooky season”, come catch this shivery reflection on monsters: the supernatural, and the ones at the end of the bar.
