There’s an old-fashioned craftsmanship to Nancy Harris’s The Beacon, a family drama set entirely in a holiday cottage on a remote island off the Western coast of Ireland. The owner, an acclaimed, iconoclastic artist named Beiv (Kate Mulgrew), is in the midst of renovating the seaside place by knocking down walls and replacing them with floor-to-ceiling windows to even more provocatively thumb her nose at the locals who have never really taken a shine to outsiders. Though she’s been a summertime regular for decades, the place belonged to her ex-husband, who died a decade ago under circumstances so hazy that a true-crime podcast has surfaced to question Beiv’s possible culpability in the death.
She’s suddenly visited by her long-estranged son, Colm (Zach Appelman), a thirtysomething Silicon Valley exec who’s arrived with his much-younger wife, Bonnie (Ayana Workman), a recent college dropout who studied Beiv’s pioneering work in school and is eager to make a good impression. Bonnie, American to a fault, is quick to interpret Beiv’s canvas-in-progress as a symbolic statement of agitprop feminism, a line that Beiv deflects with dismissive sarcasm. (“It’s a blood orange,” Beiv insists of the dark cavelike swirls of reds and blacks.)
The newlyweds’ visit is a surprise to both Beiv and Donal (Sean Bell), the local handyman whom Beiv has hired to build the new extension and who shares a romantic history with Colm that the latter would clearly like to keep under wraps. (Bell nails Donal’s lovesick longing for the one who not only got away but could never quite be forgotten.) There’s a lot that Colm is keeping suppressed, including his own suspicions about his mother and memories of a father he has recast in unrealistically hagiographic terms. Appleman conveys Colm’s smarts as well as his prickliness, how quick he is to turn surly and rude, or even to lash out in violence like a coiled spring set loose — and how he continually refuses to recognize his shortcomings, let alone apologize for them. He’s a fascinating bundle of contradictions who could be a 21st-century version of one of Eugene O’Neill’s poetic but tragically blinkered lost souls (like James Tyrone Jr. from Moon for the Misbegotten).
The tension between mother and son is palpable from the start, and Harris carefully seeds clues about the family secrets that will bear fruit over the course of two carefully honed acts in Marc Atkinson’s Borrull’s nuanced production, which opened Sunday at Off Broadway’s Irish Repertory Theatre. The coastal Irish landscape, seen in misty video projections through the windows along the back wall of the stage (designed and lit by Colm McNally), emerge as another character in the story, a malevolent force that seems to weigh down on all those who dare dwell on its craggy shores. For Beiv, the setting is an artistic lifeforce worth uprooting herself from urban Dublin to embrace. She finds she can work here, and creating art is what drives her even more than her complicated relationships to her son or her late husband. It’s a meaty role for Mulgrew, who leans into Beiv’s intellect and drivenness while revealing a canny maternal instinct that she only allows to surface occasionally, as if it would tarnish her rep as an independent woman. (Granted, Mulgrew’s Irish accent seems to drift throughout the evening but she uses her gravelly, lived-in voice to commanding effect.)
What elevates Harris’s drama are the many discussions about the nature of Art, and whether its meaning derives more from the intention of its creator or the interpretation of viewers after the fact. In one key scene, she busies herself with a charcoal drawing while fending off Bonnie’s inquiries about her process, like someone swatting at a particularly persistent mosquito. (Workman makes the most of the play’s most schematic role, an overeager American who realizes Colm’s shortcomings both too quickly, within the short time-frame of the play, and too late in terms of their overall relationship.) Artistic questions even inform the more conventional domestic scenes, particularly the inevitable confrontation between mother and son that has been building since their awkward reunion in the opening scene.
It’s an inevitably tense exchange between two characters who are unlikely to admit their deeply ingrained similarities — their intelligence, solipsism, and desire to physically remove themselves from a source of tension, even by hundreds of miles. But it’s a crackling conversation, one that never veers into maudlin melodrama or high-volume scenery-chewing and takes a lyrical, sometimes philosophical turn that still feels natural. There’s an admirable restraint here — both in the writing and especially in the performance — even as the two share feelings that have been bottled up inside for far too long, like a decade-old Guinness that’s lost a bit of its fizzy volatility but still packs a punch. The Beacon is one of the finest dramas of the year.
THE BEACON
Irish Repertory Theatre, Off Broadway
Running time: 2 hours, 35 minutes (1 intermission)
Tickets on sale through Nov. 24
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