In Nancy Harris’s “The Beacon,” currently on at the Irish Repertory Theatre, four characters navigate through life’s rough waters. Three make it. One is still lost at sea. The back wall of Beiv’s (Kate Mulgrew) cottage on an island off the coast of West Cork is made almost entirely of glass and looks out onto the Atlantic Ocean. Angst and Anxiety, Loss and Bereavement, and Issues of Privacy: these issues, which are the vicissitudes of the human experience, drive the plot of the playwright’s narrative.

It is important to understand why a playwright chooses a particular title for their work. For Nancy Harris that title word is ‘beacon.’ In addition to the title, the word appears only three other times in the script. In her first private conversation with Beiv, Bonnie (Ayana Workman) asks about the “big white monument” she saw on the ferry when she recently arrived from America with Beiv’s estranged son Colm (Zach Appleman). Not only is Colm not looking forward to spending time with his mother: he is also worried that Bonnie might discover that discover that Donal (Sean Bell) who is now Beiv’s contractor, was his former lover. If any four interrelated persons needed a beacon, this quadrad qualifies.

Nancy Harris explores this theme in depth and these somewhat misplaced and misunderstood characters attempt to discover how they relate to one another in the present, often unable to disengage from their past experiences and conflicts with one another, or to discover how a new “family member” (Bonnie) and her “new friend” Ray (David Mattar Merlen) can so easily disrupt the delicate and dysfunctional family system. Of the four, Colm seems least able to come to terms with his past and his present. Characters run away, characters get lost, characters return, and characters are found.

As these characters connect, family secrets are revealed, mysteries solved, and past lives rent asunder by the power of the truth. No one emerges completely unscathed, and their future lives are in flux as their former lives were in disarray.

Marc Atkinson Borrull directs with a sensitive hand allowing the characters to develop as they search for meaning amid mystery, prevarication, and love lost and found. At times the action seems implausible: in the longer run of the narrative this implausibility begins to seem less problematic and more a function of the playwright’s style.