Early in Nancy Harris’ new play being given its North American premiere at the Irish Repertory Theatre, a young woman appraises an artist’s latest painting, an abstract rendering featuring vivid red colors. “You can really see the female rage,” she gushes. “Like, I’m instantly getting menstrual blood, the blood of childbirth, genital mutilation, pretty much all female suffering. Abortion is in there obviously… and repression and shame. But there’s also something really tender too.”
“It’s a blood orange,” the artist informs her acidly.
It’s easy to identify with the young woman. Watching The Beacon, it’s easy to think there’s more there than meets the eye, or the ear. This overwrought effort features family melodrama, satirical commentary about making art, a secret relationship that leads to marital betrayal, and a thriller subplot involving a missing woman. There’s also a murder mystery thrown in for good measure. In other words, it’s a lot.
[Read Michael Sommers’ ★★☆☆☆ review here.]
The central character, superbly played by Kate Mulgrew, is Beiv, who’s long subjugated personal relationships for her art. After years of living in Dublin, she’s relocated to her family’s former summer home on a remote island off the coast of West Cork. It’s a daring move, considering that the island’s residents think she may have murdered her husband, who supposedly disappeared during a solo evening sail years earlier. It’s even more daring now that she’s had most of the walls of her house knocked down to build an extension, leaving her literally open to the prying eyes of her neighbors.
The home renovation comes as a surprise to her son Colm (Zach Appelman), visiting from American with his much younger, sweetly gregarious new wife Bonnie (Ayana Workman). Despite the fact that Colm, a successful software designer, has a chilly relationship at best with his mother, they have come to visit her on their honeymoon. In winter, no less.
It’s the first of many incongruities in the play which packs in more contrivances than an Agatha Christie whodunnit. To reveal much of what happens would spoil the evening’s many surprises, including the true nature of Colm’s relationship with his old friend Donal (Sean Bell), who’s doing the work on Beiv’s house. Suffice it to say that things…happen, including Bonnie going missing after a violent argument and the appearance late in the proceedings of a true-crime podcaster (an over-the-top David Mattar Merten) who’s investigating the disappearance of Beiv’s husband.
The play, previously seen at Dublin’s Gate Theater in a co-production with Druid, proves absorbing for a while in its depiction of the charged relationships between the central characters. But it goes off the rails in the second act as it descends into turgid melodrama and would-be thriller dynamics. By the time Beiv delivers a tortured monologue in which she reveals exactly what happened to Colm’s father, credibility has gone out the window, with director Marc Atkinson Borrull unable to smooth over the many rough patches.
That the production works to the extent that it does is largely due to Mulgrew’s force-of-nature performance as Beiv, whose fascinating backstory includes having founded an ill-fated female artists’ colony on the island. Alternately funny and ferocious, the character would be a field day for any actress (one can only imagine what a feast Katherine Hepburn would have made of it), and Mulgrew plays it to the hilt, delivering such a commanding turn that you can almost, but not quite, overlook the play’s flaws.
The Beacon opened September 22, 2024, at the Irish Repertory Theatre and runs through November 3. Tickets and information: irishrep.org
