You hear a lot about Orla before you see her.
“When I enter, I can feel them making a snap decision” Clare O’Malley said about the audiences for the darkly comic “The Loved Ones,” on at the Irish Repertory Theatre through Aug. 2. “On who I am, and the kind of person that I am.
“As the show develops they soften towards me and change their mind [when] they hear everything that this character Orla has been through.
“It’s really fun to play with expectations and it’s very rare that you have four very complex women on stage. It’s a real breath of fresh air,” O’Malley said.
“Women are loving it,” she said.
And so are the critics, only some of whom are women. The praise for playwright Erica Murray, director Nicola Murphy Dubey, and the four actors has been universal across the board.
“A rare opportunity to observe, close up, four supremely gifted performers navigating the emotional maze set out for them,” said one notice.
O’Malley has been getting great reviews since she began professionally — for instance, the New York Times, commenting on what she remembered as a “tough piece,” with its numerous monologues, the 2019 revival at the Irish Rep of a 2007 play “Pumpgirl,” described her performance as "one of the year's most astonishing."
The reviewer said that it was O’Malley’s “vibrant Sinead who lingers after the play is over,” later adding, “She stealthily leads this ‘Pumpgirl’ to its soul-shattering climax.”
The arts were all around when O’Malley was growing up in Booterstown, Dublin. Her maternal grandfather was the leading poet Thomas Kinsella, while her paternal grandmother, Mary O’Malley, was a co-founder of the Lyric Players Theatre in Belfast, which evolved into today’s Lyric Theatre.
“I always knew I wanted to act,” she said.
O’Malley understood, however, that musical theatre, her main interest at the time, could not be studied in Ireland. “I knew I’d have to go to London or the U.S., and the U.S. was where Broadway is. That’s the best place to study it,” she said.
A very early experience with Broadway as an audience member, and its star performance, Natasha Richardson as Sally Bowles in “Cabaret,” remains an influence.
“It was the first thing I saw with my dad when I was very young,” O’Malley recalled. “It changed me. She was incredible. I felt that I was the only person in that giant theatre and she was singing directly to me. So, I really, really loved her.”
O’Malley is currently starring with two actors she has admired greatly for years — Tony-award winner Maryann Plunkett and Obie-winner Donna Lynne Champlin. She’s delighted to work with the youngest member of the cast, too, Alana Raquel Bowers..
The Times praised O’Malley along with Bowers for together finding “emotional credibility in the play’s thornier entanglements.”
Plunkett is her mother-in-law in “The Loved Ones,” which is set in a renovated farmhouse in West Clare. Orla is there, O’Malley said, “to scatter the ashes of her dead husband, and ask for her permission and her blessing to go ahead with IVF treatment to have his child.”
O’Malley starred as Agnes Mundy in the 2025 production of “Dancing at Lughnasa,” directed by Joe Dowling at Asolo Repertory Theatre in Florida. She also has a number of stage credits at her “cultural home,” the Irish Rep, such as “Philadelphia, Here I Come!” and “The Plough and the Stars,” as well as “Pumpgirl.” She performed, too, in the original production of “The Dead, 1904,” Paul Muldoon’s adaptation of the short story from “Dubliners.”
The actress additionally spends time working in Dublin where her parents, sister and brother live. She resided for a while during the Covid pandemic with her grandfather. “We would read poetry together,” she said.
O’Malley revealed that Kinsella, the guest of honor at one of the annual PoetryFests at Irish Arts Center in New York some years back, “didn’t think much of the theatre, which I always find hilarious.”
She added, “It was funny, in a nice way.”
The poet, who died in December 2021 at age 93, would say to her: “How do you repeat it every day?”
O’Malley also turned to composing music during the pandemic. Her debut EP, “New Heights,” was released last year.
“I’ve a new found respect for writers,” she said of that experience. “It’s nice to have my own creative outlet as well.”
For more about Clare O’Malley go to clareomalley.com; and for information about “The Loved Ones” and tickets, visit irishrep.org.
