Scenes from the Big Picture

PUB SCRAWL Jeff Duhigg, left, and Tom Hickey drink and read.

Photo: John Sisson

Hard to believe, perhaps, that the election-cycle play that best represents the wants and needs of the elusive “everyday Americans” comes from Northern Ireland. But if we could send a candidate who’s lost count of how many houses he owns to the theater for a primer on the concerns of small-town America, we’d buy him tickets to a play about Belfast.

McCafferty’s epic-yet-pointillist portrait depicts a single day in a city cut down by economic and sectarian conflict, where drugs are a major currency and the fortunes of many ride on dead-end jobs in a meat plant. Cummins deftly choreographs a cast of 21 adroitly affecting actors who sit among the audience when not onstage, as if to reinforce that their struggles—making payroll, putting food on the table, finding satisfaction amid frustrating circumstances—are universal.

With so many characters to make distinct—plant workers and wives, shopkeepers, teenage thugs, pub drunks and drug dealers—the playwright’s momentum takes a while to build, but by the third act, when the camera has pulled back to let us see the butterfly-wing ripples that connect each scenario to the next, the big picture comes into sharp focus. McCafferty and the seamless ensemble subtly, skillfully suggest the scenes’ often unseen links.