“You could be dead tomorrow,” young Dave (Daniel Marconi) tells his army buddy Bobby (Harrison Tipping) during a night out in 1979 Belfast, justifying their reckless behavior. “Live in the moment.” Thirty-five years later, after Bobby’s murder, that moment has become the only moment that matters—an endless present tense of guilt, rage, and impossible choices. Leo McGann’s “The Honey Trap,” now at Irish Repertory Theatre in a taut, unnerving production, understands that trauma doesn’t fade with time; it just finds new ways to destroy you.

“The Honey Trap” is a two-act psychological thriller that unfolds across two timelines. In the present day, Dave (Michael Hayden), a former British soldier, is being interviewed by Emily (Molly Ranson), an Irish American PhD student conducting oral histories about events in Ireland during the Troubles. Dave recounts a fateful night in 1979 when he and his army buddy Bobby went to a pub in Lisburn, where they met two women—Lisa (Annabelle Zasaoski) and Kirsty (Doireann Mac Mahon)—who were IRA volunteers setting a honey trap. Dave left early after a phone call with his wife, but Bobby stayed and was subsequently murdered.

The intercutting between past and present is theatrically dynamic, with older Dave watching his younger self and Bobby appearing as a ghost-like conscience figure. Director Matt Torney maintains an edge-of-your-seat pace throughout, though occasionally the staging choices create confusion rather than resonance. The final scene of Act I is particularly problematic: after Dave steals Emily’s interview tapes and discovers the information he needs to track down Sonia in Belfast, the stage fills with flashback figures when Dave should be alone, processing this crucial discovery. The moment calls for isolation—Dave confronting what he’s learned and what he’s about to do—but the visual clutter diffuses the tension. It’s a rare misstep in an otherwise tautly directed production that understands when to let silence and stillness do the work.

Michael Hayden, Molly Ranson, along with the supporting cast, bring a welcomed authenticity and believability to their characters in the first act. They make it evident that Dave does not trust Emily and that he knows Emily is less than forthcoming in her answers to Dave’s questions. Samantha Mathis’s Sonia doesn’t appear until Act II, but her performance anchors the play’s moral complexity. The characters’ conflicts successfully drive the plot forward into the second act, where Dave—having used Emily’s stolen recordings to locate his target—finds and confronts Sonia in a Belfast hotel room. After making one wrong choice after another, Dave gets the truth from Sonia (midst several flashbacks), begins to record her confession. After he hears Sonia’s side of the story, he discovers she knows more about him than he imagined. Dave plans to kill Sonia to avenge Bobby’s death but does not. Nor does Sonia kill Dave. Why they choose not to kill one another would require a spoiler’s alert. After another flashback, the play ends.

McGann refuses the comfort of moral binaries. The play’s central question isn’t whether what Sonia did was wrong—it obviously was—but whether Dave’s complicity in Bobby’s death makes him any less entitled to vengeance. The script meticulously reveals that Dave didn’t just casually suggest Bobby stay at the pub; he aggressively bullied him into it, calling him “bent,” questioning his masculinity, physically grabbing him by the collar. Dave needed Bobby to do what he could no longer allow himself—pursue other women while his wife was pregnant. He made Bobby his proxy, then sent him to his death. Sonia’s backstory—her family burned out of their home in 1969 while police smiled—doesn’t excuse murder, but it contextualizes radicalization in ways that complicate easy judgments. Both characters carry chains of guilt that have shaped every day of the past thirty-five years. The play’s devastating insight is that neither revenge nor reconciliation can break those chains. When Sonia finally has the gun pointed at Dave and can’t pull the trigger, it’s not forgiveness—it’s recognition that they’re both already destroyed by the same night. The cycle of violence doesn’t continue because both parties are too broken to perpetuate it, which may be the darkest ending imaginable.

“The Honey Trap” leaves us with enduring questions that McGann wisely refuses to answer definitively. Is there a right and wrong when both parties are complicit? Can murder ever be justified by historical oppression? And perhaps most haunting: why doesn’t crushing guilt result in better choices? Dave spent thirty-five years working with bereaved children, ostensibly doing penance, yet he still pursued revenge with calculated cruelty. Sonia built a new life—marriage, children, a business—yet the dark figure of her past still paralyzes her in sleep. The play suggests that guilt doesn’t redeem us; it just makes us better at performing redemption while remaining fundamentally unchanged.

McGann’s dialogue crackles with authenticity—the military banter, the flirtation that curdles into menace, the halting confessions that reveal more than intended. Samantha Mathis’s Sonia and Michael Hayden’s Dave circle each other in Act II like wounded animals, each line a negotiation between vulnerability and self-preservation. The production benefits from Charlie Corcoran’s versatile set, which transforms seamlessly from interview room to pub to hotel, and Michael Gottlieb’s lighting, which bathes the flashbacks in an amber glow that feels both nostalgic and queasy. The final image—Bobby asking for a toastie, blissfully unaware of what’s coming—is heartbreaking in its ordinariness. We know what he doesn’t: that this moment will define and destroy everyone in the room. “The Honey Trap” offers no catharsis, no closure, no hope that understanding the past can free us from it. It’s a play that lingers like guilt itself—uncomfortable, inescapable, and impossible to resolve.