Photo: Bruce Holmes, Nancy Jeris, and Laurie Thomas

The story is dark. Three sisters in a small Irish fishing village are biding their lives away. The two older sisters, Breda (Nancy Jeris) and Clara (Laurie Thomas), are perseverating over an event that took place decades earlier at the New Electric Ballroom where they were separately nearly groupies for a minor singing star. Each of their sexual encounters that night were unconsummated. The star discarded the sisters one by one and turned his attentions to a pretty Doris Day-like girl.

Their younger sister Ada (Jacqueline Reid) joins in, coaxing them on as they relive the awful night over and over and over. And while Ada seems incapable of resisting her sisters' endless repetitions, she's absolutely stuck. She knows she needs to break out of the madness and have her own romantic moment, even though it seems it would be an inevitable disaster, even if just to have her own bruises.

The sisters are hopeless in a No Exit kind of way. Ada manages to go out and work each day in the accounting department of the local cannery, but her work life is stuck in an endless "turning fish into numbers." Her older sisters seem to be incapable of any life outside the tiny home. Their lives are restricted to tying and untying the knot of one horrible night. And yet the incidents that night were not horrible at all. Crushed promises and a dash of humiliation—normal fare for a teenage dance. Yet dark it is for these sisters.

I've often wondered (and sometimes tried to explain) how a dreary, hopeless story can deliver light. There's something intriguing, even encouraging, about a playwright's ability to stare into the darkness when most would turn away from it. In the case of The New Electric Ballroom, the light is in the language. The endless repetition is poetic, the same words traveling from sister to sister, like a chant, a meaningless story of crushed lives that gains momentum and sustains energy in the endless retelling.

Something does happen in this play. The local fishmonger Patsy (Bruce Holmes), who delivers fish every day, is invited into the household. Ordinarily, Patsy drops off the fish and gets shooed away. This one time he is invited inside, and Ada finally gets her chance at love—or at least her own story of disaster that can harmonize with her sisters' bleak tales.

One of the play's speeches that is absolutely extraordinary is Patsy's luscious description of true romantic love, followed by an examination of broken love that details the pain, isolation, and deep loneliness that comes when love turns to contempt.

Walsh has won awards for a number of his plays, including The New Electric Ballroom. He nabbed a Tony for writing the book for the Broadway musical Once, and he's picked up awards for his biopic Hunger. He is presently working on a musical with David Bowie. It's clear in this play why he's getting so much attention. The light's in almost every utterance of The New Electric Ballroom.

Well experienced director Gil Lazier does a fine job presenting this fascinating play. He skillfully presents the words and gets out of their way. The all-Actors'-Equity cast is really really good. Jeris and Thomas articulate the distinctions between the two older sisters even as the characters are repeating each other's words and stories. Holmes is nakedly (or nearly so) honest as the hapless Patsy (almost too well named). His crooning (a surprise) is gorgeous.

The performance I found most impressive was Jacqueline Reid's as Ada. As she moves through a range of emotions, from trapped to infatuated to crushed, she physically looks like a different person, her age seemingly swinging from early middle-age to teens and back. Amazing. I've seen all of these actors in other productions, and they're always terrific, but this is the best I've seen from each of them.

The New Electric Ballroom by Enda Walsh is produced by the Fusion Theatre Company. The play runs at the Cell Theatre, 700 1st. St. NW, runs through April 24, 2015. Performances are Thursday and Friday at 8:00 pm, Saturday at 2:00 pm and 8:00 pm, and Sunday at 6:00 pm. Tickets are $40, $35 for senior and students. On April 25th the show will move to the KiMo Theatre. On April 26th it will at the Lensic Performing Arts Center in Santa Fe, and May 2nd and 3rd it will be at the Rio Grande Theatre in Las Cruces. For reservations, go to fusionNM.org, or call 766-9412.

The performance at the KiMo Theatre will be Pay What You Wish, thanks to support from the City of Albuquerque. Visit KiMoTickets.com for tickets. Tickets for the Santa Fe performance are $15-$35, and can be purchased at lensic.org or by calling 505.988.1234. Tickets for the Las Cruces performances can be purchased by visiting: riograndetheatre.com. Prices are $20-$35.

Photo: Harrison Sim

--Rob Spiegel