Theatre in Review: Lunar Eclipse (Second Stage)Lunar Eclipse begins with a shocking sight: Reed Birney sobbing. If it were virtually any other actor, the moment might pass with little notice. Birney, however, is something different. The New York theatre's most indispensable character actor has a broad gallery of characters to his credit (including a couple of blood-freezing villains), but he specializes in stoic, quietly frustrated everyman types, the sort of guys who shoulder their troubles and carry on, no matter what. Over the years, he has developed a remarkable economy of means, suggesting profound emotions with the smallest gestures. (In his previous appearance, in Chester Bailey at the Irish Rep, a simple forty-five-degree turn of the head was all he needed to suggest a soul corroded by sadness.) But Donald Margulies' two-hander calls for tears up front, and there is Birney, never one to shirk an acting task, racked with sobs. And what an unsettling sight it is: To be sure, George, his character, is riddled with regrets. A Kentucky farmer, he has planted himself in the middle of a field to witness the event of the play's title -- he is something of an eclipse connoisseur -- but he can't help noticing that, a few feet away, lies the grave where, only a few days earlier, he buried his beloved dog. For that matter, the field is filled with the remains of pooches past, each tied to a different stage of his life. Deeper sorrows lurk in the background: The son who died young, a drug addict, and the daughter who has learned to keep her distance. The realization that, once he is gone, his farm, part of his family for several generations, will probably end up hosting a Wal-Mart. George is also afflicted by a sense of time passing, of a world desperately out of joint. Worst of all, he fears the onset of cognitive decline. He shares such dark thoughts with Em, his practical wife, who carries her emotional load without complaint, facing each day as it comes. To be sure, she occupies no bed of roses: Accused of hating farm life, she denies the charge, then adds. "I hate planting season, that's true. And harvest. And the winters are brutal. The summers are no picnic, either." ("What else is there?" wonders George.) Dropping her guard, she admits being haunted by her failure to have children. (Their son and daughter were both adopted.) "The cruelty of it all! Living on a farm, planting seeds, making things grow, and trying for years to conceive..." Not helping her mood is George's prediction that they will die twenty-two years later, in an assisted living facility, she from ovarian cancer and he from dementia. No wonder she tells him, "You make me nervous." Not much happens in Lunar Eclipse: As the blood moon comes and goes, George and Em take inventory of the events, many of them tragic, that have shaped their marriage, as a momentous astronomical event unfolds in front of them. There's a touch of Thornton Wilder in the way Margulies sets his characters' woes against a backdrop of the vast, mysterious universe. But Lunar Eclipse is a plangent chamber piece with a point of view all its own: It's a portrait of a couple trying to scratch out a patch of solid ground in a world that, thanks to the erosions of time, is simultaneously shrinking and slipping away. George and Em have arrived at that stage of life when each day requires new infusions of grace; Margulies leaves it to us to decide if they are up to this challenge. Kate Whoriskey's production situates the action in a gently rolling patch of farmland, stunningly realized, down to the last blade of grass, in Walt Spangler's naturalistic scenic design. S. Katy Tucker's video projections track the eclipse's progress and reveal a series of subtly changing sky views, ultimately arriving at a firmament filled with a multitude of stars. Amith Chandrashaker's infinitely sensitive lighting reflects both the passage of the hours and the characters' shifting moods. Sinan Refik Zafar's sound design blends a multitude of effects (crickets, coyotes, car engines) with Grace McLean's lovely underscoring. Jennifer Moeller's costumes have the unmistakable ring of authenticity. Birney and his co-star, Lisa Emery, find every note of humor and loss in Margulies' plainspoken dialogue. There's real fear lurking under George's grumpy manner ("Am I gruff?" he asks, a question that answers itself) as well as a searching honesty, to the point of admitting that he doesn't miss the son he so desperately failed. Generalizing his unease -- and, one suspects, speaking for many in the audience in an attention-getting outburst, he lays bare his conviction that the center cannot hold. ("Everything we've known, and thought was true, that we were taught was true, that our parents and teachers, and preachers told us...It was all a lie. And now, whatever was holding it all together, it's falling apart. And it's all gonna come crashing down.") As his handling of this passage shows, there is no more authoritative actor working in New York today. Emery's Em, slyly accepting a slug of bourbon in her hot cocoa, puts her listening skills to excellent use; she also has a great, deadly stare when nonsense is being spoken. And she captures Em's disarming honesty, her way of landing a devastating truth so swiftly that it takes a second for the impact to be felt. "You've shed more tears for that dog than you have for your own son," she says, an argument George doesn't try to refute. Despite George's many laments, it is Em who lands the play's TKO when, in the middle of a spat, she says, with a sudden, stabbing realization, "Being human is terrible, isn't it?" Long one of New York's most underrated actresses, she is here happily gifted with a role worthy of her talents. Under Whoriskey's deft, emotionally acute direction, the two stars are well-met by moonlight. Whoriskey also strikes a casual mood, letting the play's darker notes slip out where they will and establishing an intimacy that shows how, despite everything, George and Em have the sort of marriage that endures -- and perhaps is solidified by -- each new setback. The director also deftly handles a seemingly small incident that realizes George's worst fears, followed by a flashback that shows George and Em in the first flush of youthful happiness. Lunar Eclipse is, at first glance, a slip of a thing, as insubstantial as moonlight; look closer, however, and you'll find a universe of powerful feelings. --David Barbour 
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