Okay. Okay. Okay Okay Okay…….OKAY! Ames begins, emptying his last drop of bourbon as he struggles to tell his story. So starts Sam Shepard’s melancholic, humorous foray into the tangled minds of Ames and Byron. Alone together in an alien landscape, two old friends wrestle with their personal demons, and then do a bit of fair bit of wrestling with each other. A relationship of confusion, violence, resentment but ultimately affection unfolds on one long whiskey drenched day, in anticipation of a lunar eclipse.
Shepard’s play returns to the Abbey this month until the 28th, after a sellout run last year. He wrote the parts for the two Irish actors, Sean McGinley and Stephen Rea, who’s American drawls prove faultless. The actors are two and the premise is simple.Brien Vahey’s minimalist set consists of a dusty wooden porch, two chairs and a table. Presided over by the ever ‘finicky’ overhead fan, humming drowsily, stopping erratically, and finally building to a bursting climax.
Ames has brought Byron to his lonely retreat in an unnamed place, following the break up of his marriage. The stately Byron answers his old friend’s desperate plea and makes the three day journey by Greyhound bus, fearful that Ames is on the brink of suicide. They begin to wind down a road of nostalgia, drowning their sorrows in local bourbon and soft downy memories, but end up stumbling upon rockier topics of conversation. Musing over their current sexual prowess, Ames describes the unfulfilling liaison with a younger woman that led to his exile while Byron laments his own failing libido. The conversation travels on, sometimes fluid and often discordant, as complex memories of hidden rivalries between the two resurface. It is the pace of the dialogue that really elevates this play and keeps the relationship captivating.
Stephen Rea’s Ames is bizarrely comic in an often unnerving way. His facial contortions and exaggerated physicality verge on the ridiculous but never quite cross the line. He teeters on the edge of believability in so successful a way as to endow Ames with a license to do almost anything he pleases. When he runs for the shotgun, chasing his best friend through the barren countryside (imagined of course, for only the blank stage lies before us) none of the atmosphere is broken.
These dynamic changes in energy serve only to reflect the volatility of this reluctantly aging man. Ames dominates the drama, conserving all the nervous energy for himself, while Byron sits calmly, offering up momentary nuggets of philosophical introspection that only incense Ames further. The balance shifts dramatically towards the close, however, when Byron lets go a bleakly poetic monologue. The two men sit uncomfortably close for this final section, as Ames crouches down in a pathetic attempt to lift his friend onto his back and Byron unexpectedly spills his revelation of loss.
Shepard’s dénouement is ambiguous, as is the overall sense of place and time in the play. The audience is left to judge what is most significant. Friendship? Mutual desperation? The subjectivity of memory? Or perhaps a simple mortality crisis? As Ames and Byron passively watch the lunar eclipse they have been awaiting, we are left to watch them, and to wonder.
Ages of the Moon runs in the Abbey Theatre until Saturday November 28th.
