Remembered glories, in 'The New Electric Ballroom'

We all know someone who had one big thing happen in their lives long ago, and for whom that thing — scoring a crucial touchdown, winning a beauty pageant — becomes the defining event of their existence. They get stuck on faded glory.

So it is with Breda (Melissa Hart) and Clara (Katherine Ferrand) in Enda Walsh's "The New Electric Ballroom," which opened over the weekend under Wendy Knox's enthralling direction at the New Century Theatre in Minneapolis. The two sisters at the heart of this strangely alluring one-act have, in fact, become ghostly because of their experience. They have not left their house in an Irish fishing village in ages. In their self-imposed exile, they get to create, and re-create, their past glories.

Back in the 1960s, the two women met a rocker at a concert. The attention that he paid them awakened a hungry desire in them and turns out to be the highlight of their lives. Breda and Clara, both much older now, take turns re-enacting the encounter. They apply garish lipstick and eyeliner so they look like messy Halloween versions of the Joker. They change into the clothes they wore and play songs on a reel-to-reel device.

Their loveless younger sister, Ada (Virginia Burke), curls up under a table when they decide to perform. She and fishmonger Patsy (Patrick Bailey), who visits as regularly as the tide, are the only other two people in their world.

The production has a drab, dull-colored set by Andrea Heilman (she also designed the set for "Marcus: or the Secret of Sweet," which opened the same weekend). But the performances are the thing that makes it hard to avert your eyes.

Ferrand gives us a Clara with the vulnerable vacancy of someone whose soul has been drained from her and who only gets filled up in the re-enactment. (The show is a sly tribute to theater.)

Hart's Breda is a tad less spectral. But if she has given up ghostliness, it's only because she wants to show her cracked craziness.

Bailey, whose Patsy is of mysterious parentage, almost steals the show. He goes from a dense simpleton to a figure of commanding charisma in a show that is well worth seeing.

The combo of Walsh and Knox was responsible for "Misterman," one of last year's most engaging theater productions. In that show, a man replays elements of his past on a reel-to-reel tape, reliving a history that he cannot change.

Like that dark drama, "The New Electric Ballroom" is strangely engrossing. The play is like witnessing a slow-motion car crash. We may wish to do something to help the poor wretches twisting toward an ugly destination but we are powerless to stop the action or change its course.

At the end, you walk out of the theater thinking about people who are so stuck in morasses, some of their own making, that they become shadows of themselves.