OUR LADY OF SLIGOIrish Repertory Theatre, 132 W. 22nd St. Until June 4. (212) 727-2737.
A woman lies in a hospital bed. Only 53, she’s terminally ill with cancer, and must be bathed and injected.
But she can rise from the bed and does, taking us back to the brighter, more intense passages of her life.
It’s a voyage of bitterness for this woman, Mai O’Hara, in Sebastian Barry’s “Our Lady of Sligo,” which opened Thursday night at the Irish Repertory Theatre.
Originally produced in London, the production boasts the same director, Max Stafford Clark, and, wonderfully, the same actress – the sharp-voiced, sad-eyed, smiling Sinead Cusack.
It’s 1953, and Mai is as old as the century. She’s dying in Sligo on the shores of the Garavoge River, and her life floods back to her.
Granted, there are others – Melinda Page Hamilton as Mai’s daughter; Sinead Colreavy as her cousin; Tom Lacy as her father; and a fine Jarlath Conroy as her husband, Jack – but this is Mai’s play.
She recalls a dress gotten up for her young body that was third-generation French, having gone from Paris to Hollywood before ending up at a clever, imitative dressmaker in Sligo. Mai also remembers Jack, and the good-looking man he’d been in the ’20s.
They had a restored Ford, and they were brimming with life. They spent some time in Africa, where Jack was a British officer.
And then came the drinking – serious drinking, for both of them. Mai had a girl and a boy; the girl survived, but the boy died in seven weeks.
It was a painful, demoralizing loss for Mai, and one that plunged her deeply into alcoholism.
Further memories take her to her girlhood days with her father, and to her college years, when she was a sparkling young woman hungry for life. And then the disordered recollections – and the play itself – end, as Mai describes herself running paganly naked and drunk into the Garavoge.
Barry is an ambitious writer, and he means Mai’s story to be symbolic of the pathetic fate of Ireland from the 1920s to the 1950s. Mai (and, to an extent, Jack) are incarnations of the new Ireland, of the promise of freedom, of the “vague but brilliant boat of life” that was supposed to have a breezy voyage.
The nasty, repressive Puritanism of De Valera’s Ireland came as a painful surprise to the wild spirits of the newly free land.
This is a rather weighty burden to lay upon any character – to stand in for a country that suffers from repression – and the play founders under its ambitions.
All told, “Our Lady of Sligo” is really just a collection of illustrative monologues, a treasury of tearful stories. It becomes theater through Cusack’s riveting humanity: She presents a life and death that, no matter how symbolic, feels entirely real.