GHOSTLIGHT

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Storyline (warning: spoilers)

The personal and professional lives of Dan (Keith Kupferer) have become largely indistinguishable from one another at the start of Ghostlight, standing in the middle of a busy street to protect his co-workers on a demolition crew when he isn’t doing any drilling himself. The cars may fly dangerously close to him when directing traffic, but they seem less of a threat than he faces at home where his teenage daughter Daisy (Katherine Mallen Kupferer) has been put on indefinite leave from school, after getting in a shoving match with a teacher. His wife Sharon (Tara Mallen) wonders how she can get through to her, or to him for that matter, when their family appears to be in shambles and he seems to be standing by as helplessly as she is. In Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson’s winning follow-up to Saint Frances, something’s gotta give, but it isn’t in any realm that Dan could possibly have prior knowledge of, pulled into the theater of a local theater company by an actor (Dolly de Leon) tired of his hammering away outside and allowed the clarity of putting his mind elsewhere as he’s thrust into an early read through for a production of Romeo and Juliet.
One of the greatest romances of all time gives way to as lovely a tribute there could be to the healing power of art when Dan starts to pick up Shakespeare. Acting opens Dan up to speaking about loss and how much others mean to him without having to express it more bluntly.
O’Sullivan and Thompson push things a little further here than in Saint Frances when every conversation becomes a fantasy on some level, talking around subjects rather than directly to them and when O’Sullivan’s ear for lived-in dialogue remains on a level few can match, it can be truly bracing when sincerity can break through. A stirring score from Quinn Tsan bestows the kind of nobility that the characters deserve yet rarely get a sense of when they’re too busy trudging through, and the more that Ghostlight reveals itself to be a production, it cleverly pulls down the excuses people hide behind not to be real with one another, delivering a true work of art.