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…
Language and translation serve as powerful tropes for colonial ownership in Brian Friel’s “Translations” currently playing at Irish Repertory Company through Sunday. December 31, 2023. Headmaster Hugh (Sean McGinley) of the hedge-school in the townland of Baile Beag/Balleybeg the Irish-speaking community in County Donegal and his eldest son Manus (Owen Campbell) teach Irish, Latin and Greek to the local students….
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…
“Foxes” a new play by Dexter Flanders now having a run at 59E59 theaters is appropriately named since the two central characters Daniel (an earnest Raphel Famotibe) and Leon (a complex Bayo Gbadamosi) resolve their issue following the age-old idiom of being “clever as a fox.” Mr. Flanders has penned a complicated story that deals with themes of sexual identity,…
There are two paths to “disappearance” in David Cale’s engaging “Sandra” currently running at the Vineyard Theatre. The audience discovers that Ethan Martin’s path has been well thought out. Sandra Jones’ (Marjan Neshat) path on the other hand is completely reactive, random, and riddled with danger. Two paths diverge in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, and the choices made by both on…
Every once in a while, there comes along a little gem of a play that certainly will knock you off your feet, especially if it is a first-rate production and impeccably performed by two remarkable actors. This happens to be the case at hand on the stage of The Irish Repertory Theatre, where Chester Bailey penned by Joseph Dougherty is…
Promising a touching love story following a one-nightstand encounter in Amsterdam, Clarence Coo’s “On That Day in Amsterdam” (currently on at 59E59 Theaters) delivers instead a convoluted story of risk, disenfranchisement, immigration policy, art history, and duplicity that has little to do with the narrative’s main characters. This is unfortunate given the actors are outstanding, the direction first-rate, and the…
As children fishing together and hanging out at the hide they had built in the chicken house, Francie Brady (an emotive and troubled Nicholas Barasch) and Joe Purcell (the effervescent and spirited understudy Dan Macke at this performance) know they could “live this way forever.” But both boys live in Ireland’s troubling neocolonial times. The political violence and the economic…
As Stacey Derosier’s lighting comes up on the stage of Charly Evon Simpson’s “sandblasted,” which is currently being co-presented by Vineyard Theatre and Women’s Project Theater at the Vineyard, Angela (a willful yet vulnerable Brittany Bellizeare) and Odessa (a confident and temperamental Marinda Anderson) slowly emerge from behind beach umbrellas (“where the sand is”). Both complain about the omnipresence of sand…
“[That’s all that’s left] of that daft urge to make amends/when it’s far too late, too late even to make sense of the clutter/of false trails and reversed horseshoe tracks/and the aniseed we took it in turn to drag/across each other’s scents, when only a fish is dumber and colder.” – “Incantata” Stanley Townsend is the celebrated Irish actor who…