Women often complain about the lack of female roles on stage and screen, and rightly so. Where female characters are included, they are often appendages to the male characters at the center of the action. As the prominent British art critic John Berger dry observed, “Men act and women appear”. Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised since most famous playwrights are men.
Mark O’Rowe’s play is a surprise. It’s not just that the characters are all women in “The Approach,” making its U.S. debut Sunday at the Irish Rep. It’s also his feat in being a man who has written such believable and naturalistic dialogue for these women. And they are decidedly Irish women in how they interact:
Cora: I love your bracelet, actually. Anna: This? (slightly incredulous, in that typically Irish self effacing way)… C: How much was it? A: €89? C: That’s not bad. A: Sure it’s not? I actually saw one on a woman in Marks and Spencer’s and had to go over to and ask where she got it. C: And where did she get it? A: Weirs. You know on Grafton Street?
Amusingly, multiple reviewers favorable to “The Approach” cited the bracelet exchange. There’s an “actually” too many for people who are truly comfortable with each other. (There’s also a nostalgia-provoking sprinkling of local references for anyone familiar with Dublin.)
The dialogue needs to shine since the whole play turns on dialogue. There is no action, as such. This also underscores the feat of the actors in flawlessly memorizing 70 minutes worth of lines without an intermission and without cues based on the events occurring on stage.
“The Approach,” is a very simple play with a simple set (Daniel Prosky). There are two chairs on stage and a table with coffee cups.
At any given time two of the three connected women will be on stage, discussing, at least in part, the one who is absent. The formerly close trio are less than true friends, having more of a shared past than a current connection. That the word “current” present itself is probably Freudian because there is a crackling undercurrent to these encounters.
You might say that the duo on stage at any moment provide a two-dimensional view of three-dimensional reality. A tells one version of events to B and another to C.
B is typically Cora (Carmen M. Herlihy) who tries to reconcile estranged sisters Anna (Danielle Ryan) and Denise (Kate MacCluggage). The characters reveal to each other to some extent the ways in which they have lied to themselves and they reveal to the audience ways in which they are lying to each other. The lies lean towards tragedy, but one is comical. To give a clue would be a plot-spoiler.
Anna is the only one who seemingly does not lie—to the others, anyhow. She is played by Danielle Ryan, whose performance stood out. Irish born, she was also the only one who sounded it.
Still, accents aside, this is a very good production of a great play. “The Approach,” premiered in Dublin in 2018, since when it has been performed internationally. It was also live-streamed from Dublin during Covid restrictions in conjunction with St Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn.
The complexity in O’Rowe’s superficially simple and satisfying play is the complexity of human relationships. Do we ever really know anyone? it asks. Sometimes we only realize how little we knew them when they take an action that stuns us, the characters find.
Death – of relationships, and in the absolute –hovers in the background. A man was the source of the sisters’ estrangement, but men come and go while the women’s relationships endure.
Despite the urge to lie, whether to protect oneself or to injure another, the characters desire connection. A flawed connection is better than none, the play suggests, and so we humans continue to make fumbling approaches towards one another.
“The Approach” by Mark O’Rowe, directed by Conor Bagley, opened on Sunday (March 12) at the Irish Repertory Theatre on West 22nd St. in Manhattan. It runs until May 10. Tickets at irishrep.org
