“The Loved Ones” seems to open with a rather accessible setup. Gabby, a young Black college student, arrives at Nell’s house with suitcase and backpack in tow. Her arrival is unexpected and unannounced. She announces that she is in her seventh month of pregnancy and that Nell’s son Robin, who has been deceased for six months, is the father. Gabby was a student of Robin’s at university. Complicating matters, Robin’s wife Orla is to arrive soon. This is the stuff of Erica Murray’s play currently running at the Irish Repertory Company.

But Erica Murray stays at least one step ahead of the audience. Just when one thinks, “Ah, I know where this is going,” Murray throws a curve. She manages to delve deeply into the themes of loss, bereavement, fertility issues, unwanted pregnancies, living without shame, and forgiveness. This is a tender story.

Nell is in the midst of bereavement having lost her only son. She is also lonely and, naturally, still going through the stages of bereavement. She is angry and nowhere near the stage of acceptance. The last thing she needs is Gabby telling her Robin is the father and that she needs to stay with Nell through the pregnancy. Maryann Plunkett delivers a multi-layered and complex Nell. Her performance is authentic and completely believable. Plunkett wears Nell’s grief in and on every part of her body.

Alana Raquel Bowers’s Gabby shows her character’s fear, vulnerability, and neediness. She has nowhere to go and thinks Nell would be more receptive to her arrival. Bowers’s Gabby is also strong and determined. Her determined, sometimes ponderous movements reflect Gabby’s unwillingness to leave Nell’s house and her need to stay grounded and focused. She will not leave Nell’s house until she has found a safe haven for herself and her child.

Nicola Murphy Dubey directs with the gentle determination needed to draw the best from the cast and to elucidate with surgical precision every sentence of Erica Murray’s dense and engaging script. Every pause, every movement, every facial expression, every breath delivered by the four actors has meaning. Whether they are providing exposition or foreshadowing, the members of the cast exercise their craft with precision and authenticity.

To accomplish her layered performance, Donna Lynne Champlin gradually becomes more attentive to the conversation, becomes more aware of how not filtering her thoughts results in Orla knowing about her husband’s infidelity, begins to move around the stage with more deliberation, and more appropriately begins to change the volume and cadence of her voice to serve the emotional temperature of the moment.

With her husband Robin’s ashes in tow, Clare O’Malley’s Orla arrives at Nell’s soon after Gabby delivers the news that she is pregnant with Robin’s baby. Orla’s real purpose for the visit is to let her mother-in-law know that, despite several unsuccessful IVF attempts while Robin was alive, she intends “to try again” using her husband’s frozen sperm. Not only has Orla convinced Nell to allow Gabby to stay with Nell, but she also expects a positive response from Nell about her decision. O’Malley delivers this news without melodrama and allows her character to negotiate Nell’s hesitation not knowing Gabby is carrying Robin’s child. In this exchange, both actors unearth the rich lode from Erica Murray’s script.

Erica Murray is a master storyteller who uses every literary trope at her disposal. Her text is rich and dense. There are select scenes from “The Loved Ones” that demonstrate the playwright’s impressive craft. As soon as Gabby shares her pregnancy with Nell, Nell knows that she cannot allow Gabby to meet Orla whose arrival at the farmhouse is imminent. When Orla does meet Gabby, she immediately embraces her plight and insists Gabby stay in her room. When Cheryl-Ann discloses to Orla that Gabby is carrying Robin’s child, the audience really leans forward knowing what will transpire throughout the remainder of the narrative. Murray constantly repeats Cheryl-Ann’s fascination with birds and includes early on the importance of a visit to the cliffs.

Orla arrives at the farmhouse carrying Robin’s ashes and her designer luggage, her clothes impeccable, her composure intact. She is a woman with a mission: to scatter her husband’s remains and to ask Nell’s blessing for another IVF attempt using his frozen sperm. She has no idea that the young Black woman she encounters downstairs is carrying Robin’s child.

Clare O’Malley’s Orla greets Gabby with cautious warmth. The two women are strangers to each other, and O’Malley plays the social choreography with precision—smiling, welcoming, creating space. But there is restraint in every gesture. When Gabby mentions that she’s staying at the farmhouse, Orla’s interest sharpens. O’Malley leans in slightly, her voice becoming more engaged, more curious. She doesn’t yet know who Gabby is, but she recognizes something: here is a young pregnant woman, alone, in her farmhouse.

The irony is exquisite. Orla, who has spent years desperate for a child, encounters the one person who carries her husband’s biological legacy—and neither woman knows it yet. Murray plants this moment like a time bomb. O’Malley plays Orla’s kindness toward Gabby without sentimentality; there is genuine compassion there, but also the careful distance of a woman still learning how to navigate a world without her husband. When Orla suggests that Gabby stay upstairs where it’s “much cozier,” we see O’Malley’s maternal instinct awakening—even as her marriage, unbeknownst to her, was fractured months before.

This is Murray’s craft at work: the audience sees what the characters cannot. And O’Malley holds the tension of that knowledge with grace.

Getting Nell’s blessing for another IVF attempt using Robin’s frozen sperm creates a scene weighted with secrets Nell cannot share. Believing she has made a renewed connection with Nell, Clare O’Malley’s Orla proceeds with her plan unaware of what Nell’s reaction could possibly be. She’s asking Nell to approve of her plan not knowing Nell knows Robin has cheated on Orla or that Gabby—whom she has embraced—is carrying Robin’s child. Nell tries to be supportive when she says, “I think Robin would want you to be happy. So, if you think that would make you happy, then why not try it at least.” As Orla moves closer to Nell, Maryann Plunkett’s Nell freezes up, her face going blank, unable to articulate why she cannot give Orla her blessing.

Clare O’Malley’s Orla’s focus on her new proposed IVF attempt shifts after she discovers that Gabby is pregnant with her husband’s child when Donna Lynne Champlin’s Cheryl-Ann blurts out, “I guess, if she’d slept with my husband, I’d find it hard to look her in the eye, let alone make her a hot drink. I’m impressed.” Orla angrily confronts Nell: “You were trying to keep her out of the house, you weren’t going to tell me. That random tourist knew about it!” However, when Orla accompanies Gabby to the hospital after Gabby is experiencing intense pain and stands at Gabby’s bedside, the confrontational stance shifts to a heartfelt moment of grace. The play’s heart actually beats when Orla later tells Nell and Cheryl-Ann, “She was so scared in the hospital. And I realised I was holding her hand and it was like there was nothing between us, like she was just a girl who was alone and terrified, and I was the only person who could help her. I truly felt so sorry for her.”

Tatiana Kahvegian’s farmhouse set, though picture perfect, seems a bit cramped, giving director Dubey the challenge of moving her cast around in a small space. Although Dubey does that incredibly well, the cramped space also affects hearing the cast’s lines when they are not speaking directly forward. Sound designer Caroline Eng does her best to enhance the dialogue and provides sound elements like the bird sounds and thunder to give the script special strength. Orla Long’s costumes are period and setting appropriate and Kat C. Zhou’s lighting heightens the play’s mood throughout, but especially in the last scene when the lighting shifts towards the cliffs.

In the final scene of “The Loved Ones,” Nicola Murphy Dubey stages the play’s resolution at the Cliffs of Moher. Nell and Cheryl-Ann have spent the night drinking whiskey, sharing stories of loss. Nell has confessed her own shame—the pregnancy that nearly destroyed her, the father who wouldn’t look at her. Now, as dawn breaks, they move toward the cliffs. The light shifts. The stage transforms.

Nell asks the question that contains the entire play: “When does it start to feel better?”

Donna Lynne Champlin’s Cheryl-Ann delivers the answer—not in sentiment, but in truth. “This feeling, this grief. It doesn’t have an end. It doesn’t resolve like in stories… But you’re going to get bigger around it. And someday you’ll feel like doing things again. Things that you might even enjoy… eventually something small will happen and you’ll notice yourself feeling semi-okay again. And it could be anything, something random, like hearing your old favourite song on the radio or someone unexpected waving at you from their car. And you’ll feel like, man, I’m really glad I stuck around.”

Then Cheryl-Ann spots a razorbill. And then—a robin.

“He’s come to say hello,” Nell says.

In that moment, everything converges: loss and grace, shame and forgiveness, death and the stubborn persistence of life. The play ends not with resolution, but with presence. With a choice to stay. With the birds, and the cliffs, and the possibility of tomorrow.

“The Loved Ones” asks questions that linger long after the lights fade. What do we owe the dead, and what do we owe the living? Can grace exist in the presence of betrayal? How do we break cycles of shame that span generations? Erica Murray doesn’t answer these questions—she doesn’t need to. She simply stages them with such tenderness and precision that we’re left holding them like stones in our pockets.

The production, anchored by Maryann Plunkett’s grief-stricken Nell, Clare O’Malley’s gradual awakening, Alana Raquel Bowers’s determined Gabby, and Donna Lynne Champlin’s unexpected wisdom, demonstrates what theater can do: it can show us that grace is not the absence of pain, but the choice to stay present in it. At the cliffs, as a robin appears and the light breaks, we understand that this play is not about resolution. It’s about the stubborn, aching persistence of love. It’s about choosing to stick around.