New York theater goers know Marie Mullen from her performance in “The Cripple of Inishmaan” as Billy Claven’s Aunt Kate who talks to stones, and from her performance in “The Beauty Queen of Leenane” as Meg who is desperate to escape from her tyrannical mother. Mullen returns to the New York Stage to play Maire the “Monster Irish Mother” in Deirdre Kinahan’s “The Saviour” currently playing at the Irish Repertory Theatre.

Kinahan’s dark play opens with Maire (a vulnerable yet villainous Marie Mullen) in bed clothed in lingerie confiding to Jesus that she “is enjoying the fag” she drags on and that she “is enjoying the sex” she just had with her young suitor Martin who “loves her casseroles” and “fills her space.” Martin is downstairs in the kitchen getting Maire a cup of coffee. As she waits, wondering why it is taking her new beau so long to brew her cuppa, Maire rehearses her life before Martin from her childhood to the present. It is in this prolonged exposition that the audience learns of Maire’s history of neglect, disrespect, and abuse. It is also the opportunity for Marie Mullen to exercise her iconic stage craft as she peels off the layers of Maire’s shattered past.

After her mother’s death, Maire’s Daddy placed her in the “convent” in Stanhope Street; however, she was not placed in a convent. Stanhope street was not St. Clare’s. It was “a reformatory for whores and Hussies” where she was placed “because Mammy died, and Daddy had to go to work in England.” It was in the cruel reformatory that Maire witnessed the myriad sins of the church against orphaned girls and young women and began to question her loyalty to Jesus. Especially after her friend Annie Coen “dropped down dead in the steam” in the orphanage’s laundry.

After six years of no visits and no mail from her Daddy, Maire left Stanhope Street, she acquired a job at Clery’s where she met her husband to-be-Colm. Shortly after her marriage to Colm, Maire had her son Francis and, after a “few miscarriages,” his brother Mel. Her life in Ireland, then in America, then back in Ireland was uneventful and unsatisfying. All of this would understandably portray Maire as the ultimate victim of the Irish Roman Catholic Church’s history when the British pulled out of Northern Ireland in 1921. She still had Jesus but not the Jesus of the nuns in the reformatory. And that change from the Saviour as redeemer to confidant and friend set the stage for Marie’s late-life unredeemable actions, which do not include having sex.

In the second act, playwright Deirdre Kinahan finalizes her attack on the Church. She carefully “builds her case” like a seasoned prosecutor and delivers one of the strongest closing arguments in courtroom history. Ironically, the same church that abused Maire as a child, has continued to abuse her by allowing her to use her faith to delude her into committing an unspeakable act. Mel (a transformative and passionate Jamie O’Neill) comes to visit his mother and brings her a doll as a gift. He also brings her shocking information about Maire’s new “lover” Martin. It would be difficult to share this information without a spoiler alert. But the tour-de-force performances given by Marie Mullen and Jamie O’Neill rattle the very gates of hell.

Maire was more than fleeced by grifter Martin. He preyed on her church-dogma-drenched self to commit a heinous crime Maire’s delusional state prevented her from acknowledging. When her son Mel finally breaks through her defense system, he discovers a woman who has emerged from victimhood to sociopathy. With no sense of empathy, with no remorse Maire attacks her gay son and his husband Jack with homophobic vengeance. This Maire would not even know how to care for a gifted doll.