“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…
In Nancy Harris’s “The Beacon,” currently on at the Irish Repertory Theatre, four characters navigate through life’s rough waters. Three make it. One is still lost at sea. The back wall of Beiv’s (Kate Mulgrew) cottage on an island off the coast of West Cork is made almost entirely of glass and looks out onto the Atlantic Ocean. Angst and…
As children fishing together and hanging out at the hide they had built in the chicken house, Francie Brady (an emotive and troubled Nicholas Barasch) and Joe Purcell (the effervescent and spirited understudy Dan Macke at this performance) know they could “live this way forever.” But both boys live in Ireland’s troubling neocolonial times. The political violence and the economic…