Marina Carr is a brutally honest, feminist playwright. Last night’s performance of The Mai at the Crane Theater by Out of the Mist Celtic Theatre was intimate, uncomfortable and thought provoking.
The story is about generations of women in the West of Ireland. It’s about mothers and daughters. It’s about gender expectations – internal, external, learned and familial. The action hangs on three main characters: Grandma Fraochlan (Alisa Pritchett), The Mai (Catherine Hansen) and Millie (Charleigh Wolf). The action of impetus is the return of The Mai’s estranged husband, Robert (Leon Markhasin). Robert is the only male character standing on the stage but the male figures in all of the characters’ lives cast a palling shadow throughout.
The tension is in the relationships. We see love and jealousy. They try to lift each other up but there’s also a drive to bring each other down; how that drive manifests is rooted on their relationships to the men in their life. The Mai puts the once-estranged husband first. Grandma Fraochlan puts the memory of her dead husband first and admits that she’d sooner have him there than her children. Millie, we learn through a future shadowing, has a son with an absent father. The other oddity is that each woman seems to ascertain their own value in part based on the daughter’s relationship with men too. It’s a difficult conundrum. The women learn desperation early on because their mothers put them second. They also are given an elusive hope in the form of romantic lore about the men in their mother’s lives. That false hope leads them to cling to desperation.
The theater seats 30-40 people. The performers and the audience take up the same space and the action in the space is often more intimate than the space. Millie as narrator seems to be the trusted source. Wolf plays the role with a subtlety that makes all the action seem more real and offers a balancing point of view. Pritchett’s Grand Fraochlan is a character than you want to sympathize with but never want to know. And Hansen plays The Mai in a way that might remind you that girlfriend who deserves better and doesn’t see it.
The play offers no redemption nor answers. In an era where there seems to be an agenda to all art, it is refreshing and frightening to see something that merely holds up the mirror and leave the judging to the audience.
Mostly Minnesota 