At The Irish Rep, Director Marc Atkinson Borrull Shapes “The Beacon” into a Showcase for Kate Mulgrew and The Cast

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Thursday, 21 November 2024 19:26

Written by Brad Balfour

Kate Mulgrew and Zach Appelman in "The Beacon". Photo by Carol Rosegg

Play: “The Beacon”
Playwright: Nancy Harris

Director: Marc Atkinson Borrull 

Cast: Kate Mulgrew, Zach Appelman, Sean Bell, David Mattar Merten, Ayana Workman

Where: Irish Repertory Theatre
132 W. 22 Street

Francis J. Greenburger Mainstage

When: Until November 24, 2024

Currently running at the Irish Repertory Theatre is the powerfully compelling production of "The Beacon.” Starring Kate Mulgrew as Beiv, she is a renowned artist who has left her suburban Dublin home for a secluded cottage on a rugged island off the coast of Ireland’s West Cork. Even though she’s isolated herself, she can’t escape rumors of her shadowy past. With his new wife, estranged son Colm returns home searching for answers about his father’s mysterious death. Returning to the island leaves some people searching for a light and others avoiding its glare. Once her relative peace is disrupted, the prying into the past nonetheless comes with a cost for all involved.

According to Irish playwright Nancy Harris, “The idea for “The Beacon” began with two things — a place and an image. The place was West Cork and the image was of a glass house overlooking the wild Atlantic sea.”

She added, “Working with a company whose history was so grounded in that part of the country got me thinking about my own west of Ireland roots. Though originally from Dublin, my family moved to West Cork for an extended period of time when I was a small child because my father, another writer, was immersed in historical research about the area during the famine.”

For American actor and author Mulgrew, it was appreciated return to the live stage. Best known for such roles as Captain Kathryn Janeway in “Star Trek: Voyager” and Red in “Orange Is the New Black” the 69 year old first came to attention in the role of Mary Ryan in the daytime soap opera “Ryan's Hope.” This small screen stalwart has nabbed a Critics' Choice Award, a Saturn Award, and an Obie, and has also received Golden Globe and Primetime Emmy Award nominations.

The play was originally commissioned by Druid, the renowned new writing company founded by Garry Hynes, which is based in the west of Ireland. But to make this production come to fruition here required a director who could bring the forces of story and talent together. That required such a vet as NYC and Dublin-based Marc Atkinson Borrull who recently had a birthday on November 18th. His critically acclaimed record includes the first major revival of Enda Walsh's "Bedbound" (Landmark, Galway International Arts Festival and Olympia Theatre), David Eldridge's "Beginning" and Nick Payne's "Constellations" (Gate Theatre, Dublin), and Elaine Murphy's "Little Gem" (Irish Rep: Outer Critics’ Circle Award).

The 35 year-old had co-founded Sugarglass, a company which has presented work internationally, including the Irish Premiere of "Tender Napalm" by Philip Ridley (Project Arts Centre, Dublin), “All Hell Lay Beneath” (Irish Times ‘Cultural Highlight of the Year’), "Five Minutes Later" by Ellen Flynn (The Lir, Dublin) and "Ethica: Four Shorts" by Samuel Beckett -- which was presented in the residence of the Irish President to celebrate International Human Rights Day (Krastyo Theatre, Bulgaria; Happy Days Festival, Enniskillen). 

Because the play left such an indelible impression, I interviewed Borrull in order to prompt others to see it at the Rep before it closes this coming weekend.

Q: How did you get involved with this project in the first place? 

I brought the play to the Irish Rep. I know Nancy the playwright's work. I work in New York and I go back and forth between Ireland and here. I have known Nancy's writing from Ireland. I directed a lot of the Gate Theatre in Dublin and produced a lot of Nancy's recent works. I've been thinking about projects that would make sense to the Irish Rep — contemporary Irish plays, which could speak to an American audience but also represent a little more of what Ireland looks like today.

I thought The Beacon was the perfect play for that. I brought it to them and then Nicola Murphy, their director of New Work, programmed it for this New Work series. They do have readings which we did last October and one of the amazing things about the Irish Rep is that they can move so quickly when they want to. We did the reading and then not long after they decided to program it for their main stage in September. it was a very quick turnaround but an exciting one

Q: The play does recall those kinds of classic murder mysteries that have been seen on the stage. Have you debated the ending? Did you have a clear idea, or was it meant to be ambiguous?

Marc Atkinson Borrull: I don't want to give a spoiler for your readers necessarily.

Q: We can do it without a spoiler.

Marc Atkinson Borrull: I read the ending as not ambiguous. Certainly Kate and I spent a long time discussing, debating and thinking about this in rehearsal. we came to our own conclusion; I think that that's essential. she can't play that ending without knowing what she believes happened. And so, to try and answer your question, I would say that one of the things that animates this play is this huge secret between mother and son that has existed for over a decade.

I think really the journey of the play is that, by the end of the second act, she’s forced to tell him this secret she's been wanting to tell him for years and years and years — but vowed not to. I know from my conversations with Nancy [Harris], that, of course there is some ambiguity there as there always is in life, but the intent is that there is a truth that is told at the end.

Q: I worked around it by leaving that word ambiguity in there. It reminded me a bit of Hitchcock. Did you have certain other stories that it brought out in mind? It brought Hitchcock out clearly. This could have been filmed by Hitchcock.

Marc Atkinson Borrull: There's a Hitchcock-esque quality to it, isn't there? I try to treat each individual project as its own thing, but there's certainly a little bit of Hitchcock in there, and that form of the thriller that’s running through it is really clear. Strangely, I was thinking a lot about Greek plays and those kinds of secrets that are kept between families and this idea of a curse that gets passed down from generation to generation whether people want it or not. I think that those overtures are pretty conscious in this writing. 

As you know, the kind of emotional places where the play arrives are pretty extreme, and I think there's a lot being borrowed from the structure of these old Greek plays. I also know that it was Nancy's first attempt to write a well-made play. A lot of her work is much more formally experimental, usually and I know that she was in a particular state of mind where she really wanted to write her own version of a well-made play. So there's bits of it in there as well.

Q: It also recalls a bit of that movie with Michael Caine and Christopher Reeve — “Deathtrap” [based on the 1978 play of the same name] or "Sleuth." What is great about this play is that it reminded me of things that made it familiar, but at the same time, it had its own unique storyline. The dynamic between mother and son, which was unusual. 

One of the things about it was that sometimes you get a story and you need to have a history lesson. This was not when I had to have a history lesson, but you're right about the Greek tragedy. there's all these things that it touches on. Were there things that brought, besides the Greek tragedy, were there other things that brought up for you,

Marc Atkinson Borrull: The other kind of references?

Q: Not so much references, but you could see you are intrigued about the play because it brought you along the same lines as these other productions, but it was a very different storyline, but it had this element of mystery. It had this question of personality, why the family was that way. Like you said, there was a family history there that is meant to be, you need to learn. And what's good about the play is you learn it very quickly.

Marc Atkinson Borrull: I think you're absolutely right, that the story could play out in lots of different locations, but I think that it's also doing something, talking about contemporary Ireland in an interesting way. Ireland is a country that's changed so drastically over the last 20 years. I moved to Limerick when I was 11 years old. 

I've seen just an enormous amount of change over the 20 years for me There such change  30 years later for the country from legalizing divorce, contraception, gay marriage, and abortion. The country has undergone a pretty radical sea change, and I think that Nancy was self-consciously trying to write an Irish play, which deals with contemporary themes.

The plot between the two men, even just the representation of Beiv, this character as a fierce, fearless, feminist Irish artist who is very uninterested in the old tropes. I think all of that is a pretty conscious decision on Nancy’s part to try and represent a more contemporary vision of Ireland, but through a form, essentially a kitchen sink drama, a form that is, as you say, very recognizable for audiences.

Q: It also reminds me of the life and writing of the late author Edna O’Brien. I just saw a documentary about her, and it made me think about how much Ireland is now driven by women as opposed to by men. You can think about how horrible those men were in Ireland, and you could understand Beiv’s behavior in light of that.

Marc Atkinson Borrull: Absolutely. It was her desire to run away and just create her art on a small island.

Q: Also to be this distinct personality in her own right and not be defined by men as so many women in Ireland were forced to be.

Marc Atkinson Borrull: I suppose if you want to think about it metaphorically, there’s a metaphor at the center of the play obviously, of this painting [with its huge red encircling shape at its center] that we're staring at. We don’t know what we're supposed to see inside it, but perhaps there is an answer in there that’s been staring at us all along. 

When Nancy and I were preparing the play, she talked to me about shame and guilt and their role in Irish society and culture. I don't think it's a coincidence that a contemporary female Irish writer is writing a play about a secret or something that everybody knows but is unwilling to look at properly or is willing to look to the side of it in order to see something else. Or even to see what they want to see rather than what's really there. If we think about some of the great shames that have been in the last couple of decades, there has been a culture of looking away or seeing what you want to see. So I think, even metaphorically, some of that is infused with the play.

Q: Having mentioned shame and guilt, you've got to see this Edna O'Brien film because it talks about how she had to deal with the shame and guilt being foisted on her because she was a liberated Irish woman at a time when that was not tolerated.

Marc Atkinson Borrull: Absolutely. she was sort of a trailblazer in that way, wasn't she?

Q: The play builds on that tradition, but it's very much a play that could only have been created after all the things that have happened in Ireland — fighting for abortion and women's rights and gay rights and such. 

Marc Atkinson Borrull: Of course. Exactly. Right.

Q: You obviously have an English accent. How does that come into play with your history of having lived in Ireland? Now you're living in the States, I assume.

Marc Atkinson Borrull: I’m a bit of a mongrel. When I'm in England, they tell me that I have an Irish accent, which I don't understand because I think it’s southern English. Nobody ever knows where to place me. My father is English of Irish descent, and my mother is Catalan from Spain. I was born in Canterbury, England, but we moved around a lot when I was a kid. I lived in England for most of my childhood. Then we ended up moving to Limerick in the west of Ireland when I was 11 years old. I spent all of my teenage years in Ireland and then went to Trinity first and Dublin for undergrad. I moved here to New York for grad school. For some reason, my accent has stayed stubbornly like this. I don’t know what it is, but I can't even do other accents.

Q: Now that you're in New York, were you acting as well?

Marc Atkinson Borrull: No, I'm just a director. When I first went to university in Dublin, I thought I was going to be one. I was tunnel visioned into becoming an actor, but the truth is, I was not very good. Then somebody said to me, “Hey, would you like to direct this show?” I sort of thought, “Oh, well, why not? I'll give it a try." Of course, I immediately fell in love with it, and it helps that it was something I could do well. 

Q: Now you're directing plays. Have you done films at all?

Marc Atkinson Borrull: I’ve worked on a couple of small independent films. During Covid, I realized that I couldn't really rely on live entertainment, so I started to get interested… I've always been a lover of film, but I've never worked in it, so I've just been dipping my toes into it. I've made a couple of little independent shorts, but I'm planning to do a bit more of it over the coming years.

Q: I was really trying to draw the distinction in my head of directing a movie versus directing a play. It has been said many times that directing a play is a whole different animal from directing a film because there are so many other issues. There's a lot of things you have to be concerned with that have nothing to do with the actors. Yet with a play, it’s all about the actors and their relationship to the words. what it is for you, the process of directing a play?

Marc Atkinson Borrull: For sure, you're right. When you're directing a film, what you're thinking about is the cut. how is each scene or each take going to cut together and what is the rhythm of that? how do you create meaning using clever cuts whereas on stage, you're thinking about continuous action, right? How do you tell the story over the course of one whole night or one whole series of events that doesn’t stop and doesn't cut away. It has to keep moving. in the theater, we're thinking a lot about how one thing leads to the next, and then leads to the next thing. How do you do that fluidly? A lot of directing is just threading the needle from moment to moment

Q: In this play, because it's essentially in one room with one dominant image, you really have a lot of elements of directing that aren't the same as say some other play where there's more than one set, for example.

Marc Atkinson Borrull: No, you have my job in the play, this is to go really zoom really into the acting to make sure that the acting is as detailed as nuanced, just complicated as possible. And I think we've really achieved that with this production, the five actors are presenting really complex relationships and that hopefully the audience is tracking how those relationships change over the course of an evening. And of course, you're also thinking about the choreographic elements. Where do people stand in that one room?

Q: And how they move.

Marc Atkinson Borrull: Exactly, how they move, how close to one another, how far when they're looking at each other when they're not. There's a moment that I particularly like in the second act where it's just Baiv and her son Colm, and they're talking about his missing wife, and he's so angry at her, but then he goes and sits right next to her on the couch. 

Although they are absolutely tearing each other apart, they're sitting right next to each other, sort of softly. That's true of parents and children sometimes you can be so enraged with the other person and yet need them to be your parent. that kind of complexity between what people are saying and people are doing physically, being at odds with one another is what makes theater acting so exciting and so interesting.

Q: Well, one thing you do is that you've figured out how to make the characters really feel distinct within each other, in who they are.

Marc Atkinson Borrull: Yes.

Q: With that in mind, did you know any of these actors before? Or was everybody new? Kate was new to you, I gather.

Marc Atkinson Borrull: These were all brand new to me. Yes. We approached Kate and she said yes, and she's such a wonderful actor and collaborator that I feel like I've known her for decades. But yes, it was the first time we've worked together. And then the others who are terrific, they all came to me through auditions and we had a wonderful casting director,Geoff Josselson, who introduced me to all of them. But yeah, completely new. And it's the first time in a long time that I've worked with a company of all completely new actors. I tend to like to work with people who I've worked with before and develop that kind of relationship and sort of shorthand that comes through long collaborations. But this was brand new and it was really refreshing, I have to say.

Q: Talk about what was unique in working with the Irish Rep?

Marc Atkinson Borrull: People always say to me, when you're working at the Irish Rep, it's like coming home. It sounds like a cliche, but that’s absolutely right. Basically, they run that building like a big family. They take such good care of you and the actors. That's pretty unique. You can end up in theaters where everybody is doing their job and doing them well, but here you can tell that there's a sort of extra layer of care. I also think that by the standards of New York theaters, they moved really fast, which is really exciting. Sometimes you can be talking to a theater about a project and they're saying, oh yeah, maybe in two years it's going to fit into our program. 

Because of the way that they work, something like this can happen, which is really exciting. They care so deeply about the work that gets put on their stage. It's such a unique space to work in because it's quite an intimate house in some ways, but they can attract such amazing actors like Kate. audiences have this opportunity to get right up close to really astonishing performers. I think that's a pretty unique thing that they have that is so exciting for a director.

Q: Did you go back in and watch any episodes of Star Trek: Voyager?

Marc Atkinson Borrull: Of course [chuckles]. And Orange is the New Black too. You know.

Q: Yes. But  I'm a devotee of Star Trek: Voyager.

Marc Atkinson Borrull: it’s terrific to go back and watch some of it and remember how radical it was. you see that's the thing about Kate, that's why she's so brilliant for this role. Just like Baiv in the play, she's a trailblazer. how radical it was to have a female captain in Voyager and the way that she was presented and the way that Kate insisted on her being presented. It is even true of her earlier work. Did you know "Ryan’s Hope" at all? The first show she starred in?

Q: I saw it in its day. Yeah.

Marc Atkinson Borrull: I’ve only seen clips from it, but even from what I understand that there was a kind of radicalness in Kate's portrayal of Mary Ryan too at the time. I just think she's had a career of being a fearless trailblazer. So it's a real honor to be a small part of that

Q: Well, did you ever feel a little intimidated or that, you felt, damn it, I'm going to make sure I am the director.

Marc Atkinson Borrull: Well, that is my job, is to whatever feelings of, I think it's Peter Brook used to say, the famous director, when he was asked, what do you do on the first day of rehearsal? His answer was always, whatever it takes to get to the second day. Directors are not immune to feeling intimidated or nervous or feeling like you've got to prove yourself in front of your team. But our job is to park those feelings and lead the process. 

The way I try to do that is to treat any actor, to treat everyone like any actor. They're a collaborator who's there in front of me, and I'm excited to see what they're going to do and how I can help push that. The thing with people like Kate is she's a consummate professional who loves the work. So if you can just focus on getting down to the granular detail of the work and all of it then everything else goes out the window, who she's, what she's done, and it's just two collaborators focusing on the material.

Q: obviously even if an actor has done a lot — has a large body of work — you can't think about it. You have to think about them in relation to the play only.

Marc Atkinson Borrull: Exactly right. Also remember that I have to remind myself all the time that they too are, each project is new and they too are nervous. Will I figure this one out? Will this one be different from the rest? How am I going to live up to the kind reputation and all of those kinds of questions that they're dealing with? And when you remember that as a director, it gives you a lot of empathy for what that actor is in the middle trying to figure out.

Q: You're right in a way when you're a well-known actor who's taking on a role that, I don't remember when Kate was last on stage, there's a certain pressure put on them in a way.

Marc Atkinson Borrull: Of course. And it's brave, the camera, we were talking about the difference between film and theater. And while film of course, is film acting extremely difficult in its own ways, it does shield you a little bit from that. You can always have another take or you can edit around something or in theater, you are right out there and you could be there for two hours. And it's a very vulnerable, brave thing to do. I always think when actors come back to the theater.

Q: Then you got to get up there the next day.

Marc Atkinson Borrull: Exactly. Whatever happens, you got to do it again.

Q: do you have hopes to take this elsewhere or for it to enjoy some further life with the Irish Rep at another point? Or is there any kind of conversation in that regard?

Marc Atkinson Borrull: It's early days for those kinds of conversations. I know that they obviously have, they have stuff, they have their own next bits of work coming up, so I don't anticipate that we'll be extending this specific run of it, but I know that the play’s being a real hit with their audiences. And so you'd never say never. It would be a joy to see it have a further life. I'm pretty sure that this will be the start of the journey with Kate, with Nancy [the playwright] and with the rest of the ensemble. These are all artists I want to keep working with.

Q: In any case, It was an audience-expanding show that has been getting rave reviews.

Marc Atkinson Borrull: Oh yes, great…

Q: I didn’t realized how critical a role you had. This is special because it brought in a new director — not necessarily new — but a director that hasn't been there on that stage so much. That in and of itself was something I didn't think was as emphasized because, of course, you had the spotlight on Kate, and that's an important point.

Marc Atkinson Borrull: The Irish Rep [team] are really brave in the way they do things. I actually directed there once before in 2019, just before the pandemic, and was a 28-year-old director who'd done some relatively high-profile work in Ireland, yet I was still young and inexperienced. They took a risk, a gamble on me. They said, "Okay, let's give you a show." I'm always amazed and impressed by theaters that are willing to do that with younger artists because there are so many places where they're so risk-averse. I think one of the amazing things about the Irish Rep is that they just go, "Sure, let's try something and see what happens."

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