Review- Milwaukee Rep’s The Seafarer

With his years as a fixture of American Players Theatre, and training at the Delaware PTTP, Lee Ernst is an actor steeped in the classics. Looking back over his broad range of leading roles at the Milwaukee Rep, it’s characters like Cyrano, Richard III and Goldoni’s madcap Truffaldino that stick in the memory.  He’s an actor of impressive physicality and ample technique.
But as the Rep’s current production of The Seafarer demonstrates, he’s also an actor with a deep sense of empathy and insight. An artists whose soul is as deep as the vast ocean evoked in Conor McPherson’s devastatingly beautiful play.
Ernst plays Sharkey, a man on the cusp of redemption who faces a long night’s journey that may be his ultimate undoing. Recently returned from out-of-town work, he carries with him the glimmer of a budding love affair. He cherishes a Christmas gift sent by a recent female acquaintance, and he’s sworn off alcohol. But it soon becomes clear that the burdens of his home life will hardly allow him to realize that pipe dream. He cares for his hilariously ungrateful older brother (played with Dickensian gusto by James Pickering), who was recently blinded. And makes his life among a gaggle of chatty drunks who constantly remind him of a life’s worth of failures and disappointments.
McPherson’s writing skillfully avoids bald exposition of his character’s lives, but we still feel Sharkey’s burdens with every step Ernst takes on stage. The role has been played by big, hulking actors (David Morse on Broadway and Francis Guinan in a terrific Steppenwolf production I saw two years ago), but Ernst shows the weight of the world on his smaller frame just as well. His physical vocabulary—a trudging schlump and a tendency to let his gaze drift into the ether for long pauses—fills in the sketchy details of his past, and brings his existentially challenged character to full-blooded life.
The world here has a foot in the booze-soaked world of Eugene O’Neill and another in Beckett-land, filled as it is with comic (and cosmic) losers. And the rest of the Rep cast (Jonathan Daly and Chris Tarjan) plays the comedy just right, creating a claustrophobic world of petty concerns that serves as a backdrop to the story’s battle royal. Sharkey’s foe in this battle is the supernatural Mr. Lockhart (the imposing Jonathan Smoots), who has come to collect a 25-year-old debt. Lockhart and Sharkey face off over the course of an all-night card game, punctuated by stunningly powerful speeches describing the prosaic horrors of a life in hell. By the time the final hand arrives, you feel the life-and-death stakes as if you yourself were holding the cards.
Director Ben Barnes has a great feel for the lilt and rhythm of McPherson’s play. Some of his touches seem overdramatic to me, playing up the spooky-ooky at the expense of the play’s easy naturalism. But it’s a still a production that offers a palpable kick, and offers some wrenching (and even inspiring) food for thought after the lights come down.
Photos by Jay Westhauser.