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 âThe Weirâ and âShining City,â has a singular gift for making the ordinary glow with an extra dimension, like a gentle phosphorescence waiting to be coaxed into radiance.  In this case, it may take you a while to perceive that glow, though you wonât want for diversion before you do. What exists on the stage of the Linda Gross Theater initially appears to be all murk and squalor.  Strewed with garbage bags and clothes and festering objects of dubious identity, this is the Dublin residence of someone who, as your mother might observe, has never been taught to pick up after himself. As designed with unforgiving precision by Soutra Gilmour, it is not a place you would want to try to navigate in the dark.  Even the person who lives here, Tommy (a marvelous CiarÃ¡n Hinds), a mountainous slob of a man, stumbles upon making his entrance, having returned from what he had assumed would be an uneventful errand. He went out for some chips. He has come back with a young woman, whom he has never met before and who is covered in blood.  What follows is a group portrait of five highly imperfect people fumbling in the dark, which is true even when itâs daytime. As one character says, with the plain-spoken lyricism that runs through Mr. McPhersonâs dialogue, âItâs like my eyes have been taken out, and I just canât see whatâs in front of me, like itâs always nighttime, so when nighttime really comes, you think it feels like a relief.â  All of the people we meet here, embodied with uncompromising and sometimes ugly vividness by a superb cast, have made messes of their lives. That includes even the fastidious Maurice (Jim Norton), the older uncle from whom Tommy rents the room he has turned into such a rubbish heap.  In the weeks covered by âThe Night Alive,â which is directed with an auteurâs thoroughness of vision by Mr. McPherson, Tommyâs slovenly digs will also become home to Aimee (Caoilfhionn Dunne) â sheâs the bloody figure from the first scene â and Doc (Michael McElhatton), who assists Tommy in his fitful career as an odd-job man. Then thereâs Kenneth (Brian Gleeson), an innocuous-seeming stranger who shows up one night to wreak memorable havoc.  Tommy describes Doc as âdisabled.â (Docâs thoughts, Tommy says, âwill always, always, be five to 10 minutes behind everybody else.â) But then, so are all these characters, in their inability to make sense of, or find order in, their lives.  To be human is to be disabled, in Mr. McPhersonâs view. Thatâs what separates people into isolated zones of idiosyncrasy and also what makes them reach out for one another. This is the source of the playâs boisterous comedy as well as its aching poignancy.  Physical attempts to connect are the stuff of both slapstick and the sort of suspense you associate with horror movies. Sex, as itâs described to us, is a lonely business. Aimee, a sometime prostitute, limits her services to manual stimulation, which Tommy says is fine by him.  âThe full job, and all that huffing and puffing, itâs so unbecoming,â he says, with bluff gallantry.  When Tommy talks on the phone to his estranged wife about their two children, it at first seems as if he were ranting to himself, because heâs using a headset. Common gestures of friendship, like patting someoneâs shoulder, register as stilted and unnatural.  When a drunken Maurice collapses into grief after an anniversary funeral Mass for his dead wife that was attended by exactly three people, Tommy restrains him in a headlock that is as close as anyone comes to a full embrace. (Mauriceâs wife died three years before, after falling on the ice; he didnât take her arm, as he normally would have, because they werenât speaking.)
The Dublin writer Conor McPherson has directed his own play âThe Night Alive,â with CiarÃ¡n Hinds, presented by the Atlantic Theater Company.