Three sisters live in a hermetic world, their memories replaying a happier time in another place. But it's not hazy recollections of Moscow, if Chekhov comes to mind, rather it's one night at the New Electric Ballroom that has obsessed these women for decades. While in Chekhov's Three Sisters the siblings could, if not for self-renewing inertia, make their ways back to Moscow, the women of Enda Walsh's The New Electric Ballroom don't dream of returning to the eponymous location. It is that one night at the dance emporium that they have on auto-replay that controls their wearied lives more Beckett-like than Chekhovian.
Walsh is one of the newer of the acclaimed talents emerging from that wonderland of writers, Ireland, and his star took on sudden ascendency when he wrote the book for Once that won him a Tony Award and helped turn the musical into a Broadway hit. But don't go looking for lyrical romance in The New Electric Ballroom, a jagged and often obtuse play having its area premiere at Shotgun Players.
This is a hard play to grab hold of, at least in Barbara Damashek's production. The veteran Bay Area performers lay on Irish accents with a thickness that doesn't become clearer even after the usual period of acclimation. And Damashek's staging is also distancing with its stylized and often frieze-like posturing when a more naturalistic approach could benefit Walsh's already schematic dialogue. The distinctive mood that is achieved is, perhaps intentionally, empathy-challenging.
The two older sisters living on an Irish island have a ritual that they enlist their young sister to help reenact. Decades ago, when they were blossoming young women, Clara and Breda headed to the New Electric Ballroom filled with the glittering promises of romance. But the evening left both women not only broken-hearted but also fundamentally broken. Their humiliation, at least in their own minds, has been amplified by scandalous gossip. They have been "branded, marked, and scarred by words," the dominant sister Breda avers in one of the near-monologues that often supplant dialogue.
Whatever the shortcomings of the play and its production, the performers fiercely inhabit their roles. Anne Darragh is a force to be feared as Breda, who early on bitterly declares, "The womb is a more desirable place than this created world." Trish Mulholland is winsomely childlike as Clara, always hoping for a cup of tea that never comes. As Ada, the youngest sister who missed that fateful night at the Electric Ballroom, Beth Wilmurt is touchingly at sea as she enables her sisters' need to make their painful memories somehow bearable through reenactment. Kevin Clarke is fine as a crude fishmonger who regularly bursts through the door and briefly seems to offer Ada an escape from her sisters' prison. But, he concludes, "I'm too scared to face the world with only love as a map."
Walsh is skilled at offering up nuggets of existential wisdom. When these nuggets aren't life-disaffirming, they just forever circle back on themselves like the sisters' lives. "By their nature people are talkers," is a recurring mantra. "You can�t deny that. You could, but you'd be affirming what you�re trying to argue against, and what would be the point of that?" What is the point? That is the question.
The New Electric Ballroom will run through Oct. 5 at the Ashby Stage. Tickets are $20-$30. Call (510) 841-6500 or go to shotgunplayers.org.