Who: Marsha Mason, Brenda Meaney, Lauren O’Leary
What: Virtual play reading
Where: #IrishRepOnline
When: April 27 – May 9, free with RSVP (suggested donation $25)
Why: The Irish Rep continues its outstanding productions made during the pandemic lockdown with a virtual reading of Elaine Murphy’s Little Gem. The show is a reunion for the cast — Marsha Mason, Brenda Meaney, and Lauren O’Leary are back to re-create their roles from the in-person production that ran at the Irish Rep in in the fall of 2019. I wrote of that production, “Three generations of women in a North Dublin family share their foibles and exert their fortitude in successive monologues in Marc Atkinson Borrull’s engaging if not quite sparkling revival. First seen in the US at the Flea in 2010, the hundred-minute play begins with eighteen-year-old Amber (O’Leary), who enters a doctor’s office waiting room and talks about a night of partying at a high school ball with her best friend, Jo, involving drugs and alcohol, dancing, and her maybe-boyfriend, Paul. When she is done, her mother, Lorraine (Meaney), comes in and, while Amber watches her, discusses a strange occurrence at the store where she works that ends up with her having to speak with human resources. And then Kay (Mason), Amber’s grandmother and Lorraine’s mother, walks in and, while the other two look at her, describes her vaginal itch and her ill husband, Gem, who she loves but calls a ‘cantankerous oul’ fuck.’ She says, ‘I’m the wrong side of sixty, not dead. I haven’t had sex in well over a year and it’s killing me.’”
The reading is again directed by Borrull, with the actors filmed remotely at their homes in Connecticut, London, and New York. It works surprisingly well as the story, a series of monologues, unfolds in personal, private spaces that lend an intimacy that was just off in the stage play. When Lorraine explains about an HR person, “She reaches across the desk and touches my hand. Don’t remember the last time someone touched me, hugged me, or even bleedin’ nudged me,” it strikes deep, as we’ve all been quarantining, not interacting with other people for more than a year, watching works online in which actors are in separate Zoom boxes, unable to make physical contact. (Kay’s complaint about not having sex in a year also has additional impact because of the coronavirus crisis.) Little Gem is streaming on demand at specific times from April 27 to May 9; tickets are free, but a $25 donation is suggested if you can afford it. The Irish Rep, which has broken the mold of what is possible during the lockdown, has also brought back its ten previous virtual productions, including the must-see On Beckett with Bill Irwin, The Weir by Conor McPherson, and Brendan Conroy in The Aran Islands, each available on demand here.