All actors in The Seafarer were excellent, but Dennis Creaghan was un-fucking-believable. A recently blinded alcoholic Irishman — with a big, affable spirit and a bounty of deep, personal pain — he captured your heart and imagination within the play's first five minutes and never relinquished them. His performance was largely a collection of tics and habits: a stutter as he groped to find the proper profanity with which to respond to a given affront to his dignity; the way he raced to think of an innocent-sounding way to ask for a fifth, sixth, or seventh refill of his whiskey glass; or the way his reedy raconteur's voice filled with gaiety as he lambasted his loser brother — just to let the assembled know it was all in good fun. He was a remarkably complete character, as affecting and full of soul as any of the season's leading men, and you should probably know that one local critic went to see his performance on three separate occasions, just to see if the thing was a fluke. It wasn't.