Aidan Redmond

The Mountains Look Different

June 23, 2019

A mash-up of Eugene O’Neill’s "Anna Christie" (set in Manhattan and off the coasts of Provincetown and Boston) and "Desire under the Elms "(with a rural New England setting), the play is set on a farm in the West of Ireland. With its fallen woman theme, this play could have been written any time since 1880. First time director Aidan Redmond has staged the play by the numbers and has given his actors little help. Some of the character interpretations undercut the play. However, the play does have a melodramatic but smashing and startling ending. [more]

Two by Friel

November 27, 2018

The attempt to draw comparisons between two disparate one-act plays by Brian Friel proves forced and effortful. In a program note for "Two by Friel," now playing at the Irish Repertory Theatre, director Conor Bagley writes, “Although written over three decades apart, 'Lovers: Winners' and 'The Yalta Game' speak to each other in sacred whisperings.” In the event of seeing them performed back-to-back, those 'whisperings' prove so faint, they can barely be heard. [more]

Woman and Scarecrow

June 5, 2018

Unfortunately, O'Reilly’s heavy reliance on the production team is also indicative of a significant problem: the play is repetitive. Despite finding new, and often lovely, poetic ways to convey the centrality of death to life, Carr’s thoughts and arguments quickly begin to sound like the same melody over and over again, just in a different key. O’Reilly tries to distract us from this fault by giving the Gottlieb-Rumery-Corcoran trio creative free rein; the deathbed, for example, frequently looks like it’s floating somewhere in the cosmos. But the images invariably keep giving way to the words, which, though beautiful, grow tiresome by the second act. [more]

Imperfect Love

February 7, 2018

We are never told the name of the play being rehearsed or who the characters in the play within the play are. In the second act, the performers dressed in their costumes for Gabriele’s play reveal that it is a Renaissance costume drama but we still learn nothing about it. Nothing much is revealed about Italian theater of the time though the play being rehearsed does not seem to be in the naturalistic mode of drama that was creeping into the legitimate stage in 1899. And why did the author pick that year? No clues are given. [more]

The Suitcase Under the Bed

August 27, 2017

Exquisitely produced by the Mint Theater, Jonathan Bank’s direction is leisurely and slow, which undercuts the theatricality of all but the last and the most satisfying one, 'The King of Spain’s Daughter," originally given four separate stage productions at the Abbey from 1935-1939 and two in London in 1939. Using a company of seven, the actors appear in varying combinations while all appear in the third play, "Holiday House. " Two of the plays end too abruptly calling out for a more substantial length, while one of the plays seems to go on too long. [more]