'The Seafarer' expertly mixes comedy with a dark side

ST. PETERSBURG — Five Irish guys get blind drunk and play cards on Christmas Eve. Doesn't sound like much of a laugh riot, does it?

Well, it really is in Conor McPherson's The Seafarer, a black comedy that opened Friday at American Stage. The splendid cast makes alcoholism seem like quite a lot of fun. But when a stranger who might be the devil shows up for a few hands of poker, and more than a few drinks, a night of wit and blarney becomes very serious, indeed.

McPherson's play — inspired by an ancient epic poem — tells the Christmas story of two brothers who live in a coastal suburb of Dublin. Sharky, played with a bandage on his nose and a can of 7 Up in his hand by Christopher Swan, is trying to stay off the booze for the holidays. But that is proving to be a challenge in the company of his hard-drinking older brother, Richard, a sot in his 60s whose leprechaun charm can turn self-pitying and mean in a flash. There's a rough and ready tenderness between the two — as when Sharky helps his brother, who is blind, to the toilet — that grounds the play in an odd family warmth. Coppinger's soliloquy to a horsefly as "God's revelation" is a jewel of drunken rhetoric.

The brothers Harkin are joined by two of their drinking buddies: Ivan, whose two-fisted intoxication reaches a level of grace in the affecting portrayal by Brian Webb Russell; and Nicky, a wheeler-dealer in a Versace jacket, bristling with bravado and insecurity in the busy performance of Steve Garland. Ivan and Nicky constantly put off the women in their lives to keep the manly bash going into the wee hours.

And then there's the convivial but mysterious interloper, one Mr. Lockhart, a dandy in a great suit, played in imposing style by Tom Nowicki, whose leonine blond mane gives him a passing resemblance to Michael (or Kirk) Douglas. Lockhart, doomed to wander forever like the ghost ship the Flying Dutchman ("Thousands of Christmas Eves I've seen!"), has a chilling speech in which he describes exactly what hell is all about, and Nowicki gives it full justice.

There is the occasional misstep in the production, directed by Todd Olson. In the second act, the five characters are seated in a row at a low table to play poker, meaning that none has his back to the audience, which is good for projecting their dialogue out to the house, but it is not the way that any card sharks I know of arrange themselves for a game. The Seafarer is a pretty long play, and there were sections of the first act, which is loaded with exposition, where the pacing bogged down on Friday.

Allen Loyd's two-level set captures the cozy, squalid ambience of the brothers' lair, the downstairs room-plus-kitchen of their house, located in a neighborhood where it's not Santa and his reindeer that make a clatter outside on Christmas Eve but a bunch of winos tripping over garbage cans. The atmospheric sound design (by Olson) ranges from the howling winter wind to Celtic fiddle music by Ashley McIsaac.

The Christian theme at the end of McPherson's fractured fable seems to come out of nowhere in the morning fog, but then this is Christmas in Dublin. It's the one time of year when everybody goes to Mass, even if it takes some hair of the dog to make it out the door.

John Fleming can be reached at fleming@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8716. He blogs on Critics Circle at blogs.tampabay.com/arts.