Theatre in Review: Chester Bailey (Irish Repertory Theatre)

	Ephraim Birney, Reed Birney. Photo: Carol Rosegg

Even if Chester Bailey were a much weaker play, it would still be irresistible for the sensational father-son teaming of Reed Birney and Ephraim Birney. But Joseph Dougherty's beautifully shaped two-hander builds to a walloping climax, resulting in the kind of silence that is the greatest tribute an audience can give. Dougherty is interested in how the mind deals with unimaginable trauma, creating alternate realities in self-defense; he follows both of his characters down some notably dark psychological pathways, reaching conclusions that may leave you shaken.

The title character works as a riveter at Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II. Prevented by his parents from enlisting, he is dogged by a nagging sense of shame, "doing my patriotic part but coming home to Vinegar Hill at the end of my shift," he notes with muted bitterness. But their plan to safeguard comes to naught when a bizarre incident -- it would be blasphemy to call it an act of God -- leaves him permanently blinded and without hands. The ripple effect of this tragedy will kill off his mother and father, as a result of which Chester faces a permanently hospitalized future, like the most battle-scarred soldier. "He was not expected to survive," we are told. "No one said it out loud, but they thought dying would be the best outcome."

But something strange happens: Chester, his general health improving, tells his doctors he can feel his hands. He also claims his vision is coming back; already, he insists, he sees lights and shapes, eventually describing a Van Gogh painting on the wall of his room. Of course, it isn't there, and if Chester indeed has hands, why does he allow a hospital orderly to feed him? "It was then the more perceptive on the staff realized they had the makings of a situation," says Philip Cotton, a specialist in treating traumatized soldiers, assigned to usher Chester back to reality.

Given his work with soldiers wounded in the Pacific theatre, Cotton could use a little healing himself. "I tried," he says. "Tried to take that look out of their eyes. That look acquired in the jungle. My successes were 'limited'." Adding to his sorrows, his unfaithful wife has asked for a divorce. (Her lover, Cotton says, "insisted she confess," adding with wintry wit, "I don't think it was his place to make that sort of demand.") And, not long after arriving at the hospital on Long Island to treat Chester, Cotton initiates an affair with his supervisor's glamorous, alarmingly direct wife.

Dougherty draws a striking contrast between Chester, dwelling in a world constructed out of imagination and bits of memory, and Cotton, firmly planted in reality but morally compromised and pole-axed by grief. Separated from his wife, reduced to seeing his daughter by appointment, he has been unhappily cut loose from his once-settled life. Cotton's accounts of stolen hours with his married lover in quaintly named hotels ("The Golden Fox," "The Piping Rock Inn") are sensual yet stained by an awareness of the betrayal he is committing. One particularly arresting passage features dual erotic interludes: Cotton's first tryst with his mistress, in a Plymouth parked by the railroad station, intercut with Chester's memory of late-night hospital visitations from a nameless woman who offers him sexual release. Both men are desperately alone, clinging to their illicit interludes like life rafts. But is Chester merely having another hallucination?

The truth, when Cotton discovers it, is shockingly ugly, a secret that has the power to destroy the hospital, and it hands him unpalatable alternatives: Should he disabuse Chester, destroying the lies that are keeping him alive? Or should he show the young man mercy while helping to hush up an appalling scandal? The choice is urgent, but the lines between right and wrong, charity and self-interest, are profoundly blurred.

Under Ron Lagomarsino's emotionally alert direction, the actors Birney guide us faultlessly through the play's treacherous psychological landscape. Ephraim's Chester is a lippy Brooklyn kid with an ache underneath, a nagging feeling that he is a shirker: In one of the most poignant passages, he recalls a night on the town that ends with him, dateless, gazing at a pretty news vendor in Penn Station; it's a vision that will return to haunt him. Equally affecting is memory of a night at Luna Park, where the young lady accompanying him asks, "Aren't you ashamed not to be fighting?" Topping both sequences is his confession that, paralyzed by fear, he allowed his parents to bully him into staying home. It's an astonishingly complex and honest performance, a debut by a remarkable new talent.

Reed, perfectly composed and elegant in tweeds, makes Cotton -- a character out of a John Cheever story -- a meticulous observer of others, his model bedside manner spiked with a shot of irony. ("Delusional people cannot be allowed to roam the streets. If there's one thing reality can't tolerate, it's competition.") But he also reveals his character as hollowed out by guilt, professional failure, and loneliness. The actor's mastery has progressed to the point that the simplest gesture -- a forty-five-degree turn of his head, a smile that devolves by degrees into a grimace -- is enough to reveal the doctor's corrosive melancholy.

Both actors play off each other with rare acuity, especially when Cotton tries to trap Chester into realizing the truth of his situation: Asking Chester to describe him, he steps out of the younger man's alleged line of sight, looking on as the younger man provides a list of incorrect details. Their climactic face-off -- Cotton attacking in unbridled anger and self-loathing, Chester responding in fury mixed with terror -- is a shattering duel of wills.

The production benefits from a first-rate design team. John Lee Beatty's set frames a bleakly institutional hospital room with iron railroad arches, an allusion to the primacy of Penn Station in Chester's memory. Brian MacDevitt's lighting has the quality of old sepia photographs, with added splashes of color for memories of Roseland and that trip to Luna Park. Toni-Leslie James' costumes show her laser eye for period detail. Brendan Aanes' sound design makes fine use of the (slightly anachronistic) show tune "Haunted Heart" along with ambient effects such as rainfall.

Most of all the production is distinguished by the extraordinarily powerful work of its two stars. Reed and Ephraim Birney are part of a remarkable clan: Reed is married to the character actress Constance Shulman and their daughter Gus has been a regular on the TV series Dickinson and Shining Vale. Not to make too much of their unique connection, but surely the intensity of this collaboration -- the hair-trigger timing and tiny, but telling, shifts of emotion -- are informed in part by the father-son relationship. Whatever the reason, theirs is an unmissable double act, buttressed by Dougherty's tough-minded, tragic, yet ultimately exhilarating drama. Get ready to be stunned. --David Barbour