“Wow, there’s a lot of dark history here,” says Bonnie, a clueless newcomer adrift amid the many murky backstories churning through The Beacon, a new play from Ireland that opened Sunday at Irish Repertory Theatre.
Wow, Bonnie doesn’t know the half of it, especially since the poor ingenuous dear goes unaccountably missing through most of the second act, providing some much-needed suspense in an old-fashioned, overlong and eventually tiresome drama by Nancy Harris.
The Beacon unspools in an artist’s cottage perched on a windswept island situated off the coast of West Cork. Residing there is Beiv (Kate Mulgrew), a fearless creator of controversial art, whose thirties-something only child Colm (Zach Appelman), long living abroad as a software engineer in California, comes to visit with Bonnie (Ayana Workman), his new, considerably younger American bride on their honeymoon.
[Read Frank Scheck’s ★★★☆☆ review here.]
A mysterious tragedy ten years past overshadows their uneasy reunion. It seems that Beiv’s former husband went out sailing one day and never came back. When the tabloid headlines hit, public suspicion fell upon Beiv, a notable figure with a notorious sexual reputation. And Beiv just so happened to inherit her ex’s estate, including the cottage, in a will filed a week before his disappearance.
Nothing was proved and Beiv claims to know not a thing. Or does she? A current podcast has awakened interest in the old case and summer tourists are said to stare at the artist’s glass-walled house. “I’ve nothing to hide,” Beiv declares.
Then there’s Donal (Sean Bell), Colm’s chum since boyhood, a nice guy who lives nearby and shares a long, fond relationship with Beiv. It turns out that Donal has shared a different sort of intimacy with Colm, who brushes off their past trysts.
Soon it becomes obvious that Colm is dismissive of his mother’s art and disgusted by her peccadillos. More to the core of the drama, Colm believes that Beiv knows whatever happened to his dad out there in the bay. Meanwhile, Biev wonders if Colm may be abusive towards Bonnie. Amidst an argumentative dinner party, Bonnie flees into the night and goes missing. Drowned perhaps? Shades of you know who?
Bonnie’s fate, Colm’s denials, Donal’s heartbreak, Beiv’s revelations of long ago, and incidental stories of rich summer visitors and poor seamanship are revealed during the endless second act of this leisurely semi-psychological melodrama.
A remarkably trivial work, padded with pointless conversations about sexuality and artistic freedom and seeking some sort of leading light to illuminate a way to the future, none of it particularly interesting, The Beacon takes two hours and thirty minutes (including an intermission) to reach a conclusion. Perhaps edited to 90 minutes or less, the play at least might offer suspense, but director Marc Atkinson Borrull’s overproduced staging stretches everything out interminably.
Silent minutes drift by watching Beiv carefully set a dinner table or when she artfully arranges and begins to sketch a still life involving skulls and horns. Elaborate, often overbearing sound and stormy lighting effects outside the cottage windows separate the scenes and suggest that the weather on the West Cork coast is frequently miserable.
Enacting such tosh seriously is a challenge but Kate Mulgrew, a skilled and experienced player, does her damnedest to make the dry, crusty Beiv into an entertaining individual. Comfortably dressed by designer Orla Long in natural fabrics, tunics and leggings, sporting oversized black eyeglass frames and pewter hair gathered into a casual topknot, Mulgrew paints an amusingly snarky portrait of a free-spirited artiste who appears somewhat annoyed that everybody is getting in the way of her work. Mulgrew’s ability to recall, let alone believably animate, Beiv’s long, forgettable speeches that more or less wind up the drama is a miracle of memorization, to say nothing of a feat of forceful acting.
Colm’s increasingly unpleasant disposition is handled tactfully by Zach Appelman to depict the man as weak rather than as merely nasty. Sean Bell grounds his soulful Donal with a gentle sense of quietude. Ayana Workman appears easily natural, adorable even, as the chatty Bonnie; at least until her character registers a (poorly written) change of heart. David Mattar Merten cheerfully pops up near the conclusion as a ridiculous podcaster-influencer dude.
Ultimately the biggest mystery about The Beacon is why the usually sagacious Irish Rep chose to produce it at all.
The Beacon opened September 22, 2024, at the Irish Repertory Theatre and runs through November 3. Tickets and information: irishrep.org
