London Theater Journal: Heaven and Earth

Helen Warner Michael McElhatton in “The Night Alive,” at the Donmar Warehouse.

The line is hazy that separates the natural from the supernatural in the world of Conor McPherson, a writer who whispers to the part of us that wants and fears to believe in ghosts. Watching “The Night Alive,” his beautiful new play at the Donmar Warehouse, I wasn't sure on which side of the divide I was between things worldly and otherwise. And, I thought, there's not another dramatist living who could pull off the kind of ambiguity he exercises so exquisitely here.

Since he emerged in t he 1990s as one of the theater's most promising proponents of the great Irish storytelling tradition, Mr. McPherson has trafficked regularly in the kind of gooseflesh-raising material that shows up in Halloween movie marathons. A vampire drama critic is the central character of his droll “St. Nicholas”; a therapy patient's dead wife haunts a psychiatrist's office in the wonderful “Shining City”; ghost stories fill the rural pub of “The Weir” and Satan himself joined the Christmas-time poker game in “The Seafarer.”

The devil wore a three-piece suit when “The Seafarer” came to Broadway in 2007, and as embodied by Ciaran Hinds, he cut a figure of rakish menace. In “The Night Alive,” directed by Mr. McPherson, Mr. Hinds has been reduced to baggy undershorts and remainder-bin T-shirts that strain against his beer belly. His earthy, defeated character, Tommy, describes hi mself abjectly as an eternal mooch, or freelancer when he's being less hard on himself. He is not the sort of fellow you'd expect to commune with the spirits.

The same might be said of most of the other characters in this play. Aside from Tommy's hard-drinking widower uncle, Maurice (the Tony-winning McPherson veteran Jim Norton), who owns the house where Tommy bunks in squalor, they're a classic bunch of losers, and not even the kind you call beautiful. At least three of them seem to be suffering from some form of mental illness. They're parasites, looking for provisional hosts to leech upon.

These folks belong to a breed of fictional characters that peaked in the 1960s and '70s: the depleted, disaffected, eccentric down-and-outers who drifted through plays by Shelagh Delaney and Lanford Wilson and movies like “Midnight Cowboy.” Mr. McPherson writes about the Dubli n-bred sub-species of this type with persuasive particularity.

And for the first 20 minutes or so of “The Night Alive,” I was cheerfully resigned to what I assumed would be a piquant, sentimental slice of naturalism, well-cut but familiar in flavor. Then Marvin Gaye started singing “What's Going On.”

That number comes on the radio in the mess of a bed-sit (designed by the indefatigable Soutra Gilmour) where Tommy has lived since he split from his wife and children. “Marvin!” booms Tommy, who unpacks his bulky frame into a series of almost graceful dance steps. He is joined by his guests, Aimee (Caoilfhionn Dunne), a streetwalker hiding out chez Tommy, and Doc (Michael McElhatton), his hapless and perhaps only friend.

Unhappy people cutting a rug in a snatched moment of joy is standard theatrical fare. (Remember “Dancing at Lughnasa”?) But a strange and wonderful metamorphosis occurs here. The music swells to the point that Marvin Gaye sounds truly celestial; it surrounds us, charging and transforming the very air. (Gregory Clarke did the sound and Neil Austin the lighting.) And a kitchen-sink universe has ineffably been endowed with an extra-sensory shimmer.

From that moment you expect, not so much the unexpected, but the expected rendered in a dimension you hadn't been previously aware of, one in which Evil and Grace exist in ways we can't pin down rationally. Acts of common betrayal and uncommon violence take place, including one that suggests the Devil does walk among us in what may be the scariest assault I have ever witnessed on a stage.

The pitch-perfect cast members, who also include Brian Gleeson as Aimee's sometime boyfriend, don't go all epiphany-faced on us. Nobody assumes the rapt expression of Saint Bernadette glimpsing the Blessed Virgin. Each character remains firmly lodged in the present, often sordid moment.

But as writer and director, Mr. McPhers on has planted in our minds a subliminal awareness of more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in any philosophy. By its end the play pulses with the possibility of redemption, if I may use a much-abused word. I do mean only the possibility; but even that nebulous hope kindles a glow, both warming and chilling, you rarely experience at the theater.

Richard H Smith A scene from “The Amen Corner.”

Rufus Norris's vivid revival of James Baldwin's “Amen Corner,” at the National Theater, follows a route that is almost the reverse of that taken by Mr. McPherson. The production begins in mid-hymn, with the gospel-singing voices of congregants in a Harlem store-front church reaching for the heavens. Then gradually, sometimes a bit too gradually, we are transported back to earth.

That earth is a cruel, blighted land where poverty and racial discrimination send people scrambling for refuge. Music, the kind you might hear in both African-American churches and nightclubs of the 1950s, offers an escape. But it ultimately doesn't offer the answer.

Published in 1954 but produced on Broadway only in 1965, “The Amen Corner” is an unwieldy and sometimes blunt play, a mix of devilish satire and earnest realism, and the only times I've seen it on stage before, it has sagged. Mr. Norris's production isn't without its dead spots. But it brings a welcome and affecting clarity to the story of Sister Margaret Alexander (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a holier-than-Jesus lay minister who is confronted with her fleshly past.

What this production brings out so poignantly is the hunger for stability and sanctuary that drives its characters. Ian McNeil's two-tiered set â€" wh ich depicts Margaret's basement apartment and the street-level church she commands above it â€" suggests a world without roofs and of gaping windows where the neighbors gather like members of a Greek chorus.

The music â€" overseen by Tim Sutton (the show's composer) and the Rev. Bazil Meade (its vocal arranger) â€" shifts between classic spirituals, both rousing and melancholy, and sensuous, searching jazz, led by a lonely trumpet. That's the sound of Margaret's long-estranged husband, Luke (Lucian Msamati), a musician who re-enters her life with impeccably bad timing. That same music is a siren call to David (Eric Kofi Abrefa), Margaret's hitherto devoted son, who is just coming of age as a man.

The whole supporting cast â€" which includes Sharon D. Clarke as Margaret's pragmatic sister and Cecilia Noble as a pious schemer in the flock â€" is good. But Ms. Jean-Baptiste (of the film “Secrets and Lies” and television's “Without a Trace”), Mr. Msamati and Mr. Abrefa provide the play's compelling core of conflicted yearnings and wounded ideals.

“You've been uncovered, Maggie,” a parishioner says to Margaret toward the play's end. And Ms. Jean-Baptiste truly seems to stand before us with the rawness of revelation, more intense than she ever was while leading the throngs in prayer. Like many a tragic hero, she has arrived at a kind of self-knowledge, but at what price? When the gospel music starts to soar again, they're no longer playing Maggie's song.