Theatre Gigante’s “The Good Thief,” a boozey tale worth hearing

Theater in a bar will strike you as either intriguing or redundant. After all, a bar is a theater: Patrons wear costumes and present characters, and the type of bar determines the script. But there’s bar theater and then there’s bar theater. The Good Thief, which Theatre Gigante opened Thursday (June 9) at Paddy’s Irish Pub on N. Murray Avenue, is on another level.

Conor McPherson, an Irish playwright of renown, wrote The Good Thief.  Malcolm Tulip plays a Dublin ne’er-do-well, a hired thug who thinks both too much and not enough, in this one-man show. The story deals primarily with a job gone awry in spectacular, dramatic fashion, although in the true Irish way, the character relates incidental tales on his circuitous romp. A past love figures prominently in the thoughts of the thug through every ugly act. He thinks about her at all times, and his internal dialog is the entire dialog of the play. It is stream-of-consciousness storytelling at its height. The thug is at times disturbingly amoral and lacking in empathy, and at times obviously struggling to remain in that emotionless place. He is charming even as he’s repulsive, and McPherson’s words are hilarious and haunting.

This play works well in the setting. We’ve all been cornered at one time or another by that man at the bar who’s had one too many and wants to tell his story. The advantages with Theater Gigante’s production are two: The story is a good one, and the man keeps distance enough to make everyone comfortable. The intimate setting promotes the fiction that this is a true tale, a real occurrence, and that the narrator is imparting to you some secret of his life. The thug being an Irish alcoholic only makes the experience more real, or perhaps more surreal. It can be hard to separate what is happening from what the story-teller thinks about what is happening.

Tulip performs this extended narrative splendidly. He drinks (or appears to drink) throughout. As the hour wears on, he inevitably mixes up a name here or stumbles over a word there, in note-perfect confusion. The anonymous storyteller never shares his own name, although he delights in telling both the full names and personal details of everyone he encounters. He is an alcoholic with only a shaky grasp of reality. He’s obviously intelligent and deep-feeling, but chooses to analyze minute details of those around him and leaves his own actions largely unscrutinized. He is unrepentant, even as he tells of murder, kidnapping and other violence. In the end, he is the only survivor. One gets the impression he is telling the tale because confession is the only penance he knows how to perform.

McPherson puts his thug’s eye for meaningless detail in stark relief. He can tell you times, names, places. He remembers each sensation and each event as if it were happening now, and shares it in McPherson’s elegant, clipped prose. This anonymous thug has a natural sense of taste and feeling, but no development. McPherson’s writing is at turns vulgar and masculine or lyrical and haunting. Tulip plays the spaces in between the emotions like a cellist. The narrator is always on the verge of actually feeling something, but is ultimately too caught up in his minute analysis to actually feel it.

The Good Thief is a story of how quickly a life can change. One bad decision or one unexpected occurrence can send you hurtling down a path that, once traveled, makes you a different person. Maybe some drunk at a bar was trying to tell you just as good a story the other night, but lacked McPherson’s eloquence and Tulip’s presence and delivery.

The Good Thief will continue to play in the upper room of Paddy’s Irish Pub, 2339 N. Murray Ave., through June 11. Performance begins at 8 pm, and admission is $25 which includes a complimentary beverage from the bar. Reservations can be made by calling 414-961-6119,