By Stuart Miller…
After a soapy start, this poignant play is a nuanced and delicate examination of the lives of its four women.
Plays that stack the deck with too much melodrama and too many coincidences frequently topple over into a soapy mess. The set up for Erica Murray’s “The Loved Ones” sounds like it is primed for just such a disaster, Murray’s moment-to-moment writing is grounded and lovely. So, despite some overplotting and underwriting, the play, aided by a strong cast, is a poignant and moving meditation on grief and on how to cope with learning things we didn’t want to know about the ones we’ve loved and lost. This play, originally staged in Ireland in 2023, is different in plot but similar in spirit to the recently closed “Well, I’ll Let You Go.”
“Loved Ones” opens with a young woman from London, Gabby (Alana Raquel Bowers), showing up unannounced at the doorstep of Nell (Maryann Plunkett) in remote Western Ireland. She arrives with a major surprise– she’s seven months pregnant and, she says, the father is Nell’s son Robin.
Nell has been busy mourning Robin, her beautiful and perfect son, a college professor who died suddenly six months ago. Now she is confronted with the fact (and the face and the body) that he was sleeping with one of his students, an underprivileged kid who had fallen hard for him. Gabby has hidden her pregnancy from family and friends and now wants Nell to put her up for the final months (conveniently over summer vacation) before she yields the baby for adoption.
Oh, but Robin was also married. And while Nell clashed with her daughter-in law Orla (Clare O’Malley) she had invited Orla to fly in from London to spread Robin’s ashes. She’ll be arriving momentarily, we learn in the opening moments, as Nell frantically tries to dispense of Gabby– she doesn’t want to face facts and she doesn’t want her memorial to her son to be ruined by a showdown between Robin’s lover and his widow, whose marriage had suffered terribly through four lost pregnancies.
In the midst of all this, Murray has made Nell an Airbnb superhost, whose guest is a lonely American, Cheryl-Ann (Donna Lynne Champlin), whose overbearing ways supply comic relief… until she’s the one who spills the secret to Orla. That moment, near the end of the first act, culminates in one spilled ashes trope and one life-threatening moment that is just too perfectly timed.
The other issue is that we hear repeatedly from Nell that Orla is a prickly and difficult person– clearly not loving enough for her wonderful son– and even Orla admits to that, but those character traits are mostly defined in exposition. The Orla we see may be tightly wound (hair pulled back to prove it) but she can be warm and generous. Murray should have defined her more clearly. (O’Malley is good but sometimes struggles with Orla’s speechier moments but, to be fair, those are the weakest parts of the script.)
Despite the flaws, the first act was engaging and suspenseful. But it all left me worried that the ending would settle for something pat and cliched, like Orla and Gabby agreeing that Orla would be the one to adopt her dead husband’s baby.
Instead, Murray digs deeper in the second act. She fleshes out Cheryl-Ann, making her heartbreakingly human, although some of this should have been revealed amidst her buffoonery in the first act. (Champlin, who seems to be buying into the comic relief idea too much early on, is wonderful in the second act.)
Vitally, Murray never lets the baby that Gabby is having and the ones Orla could not become an abstraction. She navigates the wounds all the women are enduring with a delicate hand. Each woman must confront their own choices and mistakes and accept that they could be furious at Robin for his (all too human) behavior yet still miss him and love him and cherish their positive memories.
The American-born Bowers and Plunkett occasionally lose their accents a bit but they’re both excellent. Bowers conveys a bravado in Gabby that gradually slips away just as Plunkett allows Nell’s hardened shell to crack… and then re-form… and then crack. The body language, the way the women physically move toward and recoil from each other often reveals as much as the words.
“The world is not made for grieving people,” Nell comments at one point and at another, she wonders if the grief will ever go away only to be told frankly that it won’t… but she will “grow bigger around it” and find a way to rediscover small reasons not only to live but to enjoy it. A play that started with plot points writ large gracefully shrinks its scale to small and subtly intimate moments by the end.
“The Loved Ones” is playing at Irish Rep, 132 West 22nd Street, through August 2nd. Run Time is 2:15 with an intermission
