Alana Raquel Bowers, Donna Lynne Champlin, Maryann Plunkett, and Clare O’Malley Photo: Carol Rosegg
How do you recover from the revelation that the most important person in your life may have behaved in ways you consider unconscionable or at minimum unacceptable?
That’s the dilemma facing Nell (Maryann Plunkett), an emotionally guarded Airbnb host at a County Clare farmhouse who learns about a side to her college professor son – Robin, her only child – that she would never have imagined.
At the top of the play, a uni student, Gabby (Alana Raquel Bowers, utterly convincing as a young schoolgirl in the recent run of Cold War Choir Practice), shows up at Nell’s doorstep nonchalantly quite pregnant. The child-to-be, Gabby explains, is the result of her affair with Robin, who died six months ago (circumstances unclear). With the blithe confidence of youth, Gabby figures she’ll take refuge here for a few months before giving the child up for adoption.
Adding tense stakes to the situation is the imminent arrival of Nell’s bereaved daughter-in-law, Orla, whom Clare O’Malley plays with just the right degree of hard-edged competence – the shell Orla developed after years of unsuccessfully pursuing fertility treatments and suffering multiple miscarriages. She and Nell, never close, have agreed to scatter Robin’s ashes where he grew up.
Into this mix throw a clueless American tourist, Cheryl-Ann (Donna Lynn Champlin), a chipper, chatty soul who quickly reveals herself to be that scourge of the country-inn circuit, a birding bore.
The caul of grief miring Nell is such that she can barely function, and yet she must see to the needs of the other three. In the course of the play Nell comes to develop greater respect for Orla, and Orla in turn – her empathy tapped – reveals her soft, vulnerable side. Cheryl-Ann proves to be the covert sage among the bunch – just how, you’ll have to wait to learn, once all the interpersonal vectors have been sufficiently untangled, the backstories laid out (Nell is shouldering intergenerational shame).
Erica Murray’s script is a marvel of unshowy complexity, and this small-scale production offers a rare opportunity to observe, close up, four supremely gifted performers navigating the emotional maze set out for them.
Details: The Loved Ones