Caught red handed

In director Erica Schmidt’s effective, but eccentric staging, actors cast as two of the play’s seven characters enter while the houselights are still up, settle on an onstage couch and chair, getting into character as the auditorium lights dim and the stage lights intensify.
They are Ritchie Coster as Geordie, the head of the family occupying the modest, middle-class North Belfast house in which the bulk of the story is set, and his friend, Artty, a mainly unemployed “brickie” played by the gracefully appealing Dubliner, Colin Lane.
In just a cluster of words and only a few exchanges, Mitchell establishes how comfortable these two men are with each other as they settle in to watch, rather halfheartedly, a televised horse race.
The dwelling occupied by Geordie, his intensely intelligent wife, Margaret, and their nervous, troubled 15-year-old son, Jake, is, the play’s somewhat skimpy program tells us, located in “Rathcoole, North Belfast, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom.” The sparse information adds that the time is “the present.”
What the stingy notes do not indicate is that Rathcoole is an exclusively Protestant enclave populated, to a considerable degree, by former members of the Ulster Defense Association who now support themselves and their families through various criminal activities.
Another potentially useful detail left unilluminated by the program is the presence on the cover page of a man’s right hand, raised as though its owner were in the process of taking a loyalty oath. It is, of course, the “Red Hand,” the once-notorious symbol of UDA terror.
The “Red Hand,” which had its origins in the crest and heraldry of the O’Neill’s, the high kings of ancient Ulster, turns up briefly in the first act of “Trust” when the enigmatic Trevor, played here by the stalwart Declan Mooney, in the course of changing shirts, reveals the symbol in a tattoo on his chest.
Mitchell’s play bears a certain similarity to Sean O’Casey’s great tragicomedy, “Juno and the Paycock,” in that both works feature a household in which the female is more intelligent and more powerful than her mate, in which the father’s somewhat shiftless pal is a more or less permanent guest, and in which a teenaged son exists in a state of permanent peril. In addition, the mother in both plays is more keenly aware of, and more deeply concerned with, the seriousness of her son’s situation than her husband is.
The plot of “Trust” revolves around, in part, the origin and the destiny of a cache of illegal arms, but the play’s real fascination lies in the expertise and originality with which Mitchell has drawn his characters, and the skill with which they are played.
Director Schmidt, aided by dialect coach Pamela Prather, has achieved an admirable seamlessness in uniting her Irish, Irish-American and otherwise Yank cast, coming up with something approaching the desired goal of a genuine ensemble performance.
Coster and Lane are flawless as the householder and his buddy, and Fiona Gallagher is every inch their equal as Geordie’s loving but exasperated wife. Mooney is energetic as Trevor, whose function unclarified at first, becomes a sort of lynchpin for the plot.
A young actor new to New York, Dan McCabe, is unforgettable as Jake, the couple’s fragile son, while Meredith Zinner and Kevin Isola shine as, respectively, Julie a local girl of fairly easy virtue, and Vincent, an English soldier in the British Army contingent stationed in Belfast. Vincent, an underwritten role included in “Trust” mainly to move the plot along, and to provide the subplot with a romantic interest, is clarified and enriched by the gifted Isola, who gave an outstanding, but largely unnoticed performance last season a Lincoln Center in Richard Greenberg’s “Everett Beekin,” playing a somewhat addled son of Hollywood.
The aforementioned eccentricity in Schmidt’s direction has to do with her using her actors to shift the scenery as the play progresses. This device works most of the time, but on the two occasions on which it is employed while two of the characters are engaged in active lovemaking, the result is a little like furniture being repossessed at a particularly inopportune moment.
Playwright Mitchell, born in Rathcoole in 1965, is the first writer from Northern Ireland to be given the Stuart Parker Award, named in honor of the short-lived author of, among other things, the eloquent “Spokesong,” a neglected play recently given a strong New York revival by the Storm Theatre Company.
“Trust” is a powerful and meritorious addition to the woefully short list of compellingly serious plays available to local theatergoers.