Review Roundup: "The Night Alive"

Tommy owes more than he earns. When he is unexpectedly compelled to help Aimee, a young woman with much harder luck than his own, the taste of turmoil he suffers becomes a full-blown meal. With his trademark humor and humanity, three-time Tony Award nominee Conor McPherson makes Phoenix Park, Dublin a place where anyone can rise from the ashes.

Preview week for the Geffen Playhouse’s production of The Night Alive — the play’s West Coast premiere — begins February 3. McPherson’s play, which has had Stateside runs at New York’s Atlantic Theater Company and Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre, is can’t-miss. Don’t believe us? Take a look at the glowing reviews …

Something bright and beautiful pulses in the shadows of “The Night Alive,” the extraordinary new play by Conor McPherson … I do not use the word extraordinary simply as a critic tacking on a blurb-friendly adjective. Mr. McPherson, the Irish dramatist who gave us “The Weir” and “Shining City,” has a singular gift for making the ordinary glow with an extra dimension, like a gentle phosphorescence waiting to be coaxed into radiance. (Read more here.)

The beauty of McPherson’s writing is that peripheral, shimmery weirdness, the tug at your sleeve of something so otherworldly and luminous, you can’t bear to turn around and look. What’s going on? A spellbinding and absolutely gorgeous new play by one of the true poets of the theater, that’s what. (Read more here.)

Conor McPherson’s “The Seafarer,” the best new play I’ve seen in the past decade, transferred from London to Broadway in 2007 and has since been done all over America. Now Mr. McPherson has returned to New York with another play on a closely related theme. Like “The Seafarer” before it, “The Night Alive” is an agonizingly black Christmastide tale of poverty, despair and transcendence that ends with a sharp twist — and it, too, is a stunner. (Read more here.)

The season opener at the Steppenwolf Theatre Company is another raw and beautiful entry in this great Irish playwright’s stunning ongoing series of dramatic meditations on life, loneliness and the possibility of redemption … All are inhabited by the imperfect, as the record shows and McPherson understands better than any other working playwright of whom I can think. The question that comes up most frequently at this stage in McPherson’s fantastic writing career is what the imperfect deserve. (Read more here.)

“The Night Alive” traffics in familiar genre types: bully, whore, simpleton, old crank, broken soul. But McPherson is a subtle and compassionate playwright. Ireland’s bard of lost men makes masterful use of small gestures … (Read more here.)