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The Beacon Needs Its Heat Turned Slightly Lower
“One can’t be moved, or even really engaged, when a writer keeps saying, ‘See what I did there?’”
Beiv (Kate Mulgrew), a painter of throbbing abstract canvases famous for their “brutal” and “feminist” interpretations, is welcoming her son Colm (Zach Appelman) back to the family cottage, along with his new, and very young, American bride, Bonnie (Ayana Workman). He’s got Mulgrew—who was in her element as Star Trek: Voyager’s Captain Janeway and Orange Is the New Black ’s iron-lady prison chef—waxing distractingly histrionic on the Irish Rep’s small stage, sticking her entrances and delivering mistily sinister speeches into the middle distance like she’s auditioning for a remake of Clue. We’re meant to laugh at Beiv’s dry zingers (“It’s a blood orange” she tosses off after Bonnie offers a rhapsodic appraisal of one of her paintings as a representation of “pretty much all female suffering”) but not at the play’s interludes of high seriousness, of which there are many, almost all too flimsy to support their own demands for a straight face.
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