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    13 Off Broadway Shows to Tempt You in April

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    New short plays by Caryl Churchill, a comedy with one erstwhile Derry Girl and a musical starring Anika Noni Rose — here’s what’s on New York stages this month.Theater in New York is nearing its seasonal crescendo, with stages Off Broadway and beyond teeming with activity. Of the many notable productions happening in April, here is a baker’s dozen to tantalize you.‘All the World’s a Stage’The composer-lyricist Adam Gwon, best known for the chamber musical “Ordinary Days” and more recently for the charming “Macbeth” riff “Scotland, PA,” sets his new musical in the 1990s in a conservative small town, where a gay high school teacher is helping a student to prepare for a statewide theater competition. With a cast of four that includes Elizabeth Stanley (“Jagged Little Pill”), Jonathan Silverstein directs for Keen Company — his swan-song production as artistic director of the theater, which commissioned this musical. (Through May 10, Theater Row)‘Danger and Opportunity’The Obie Award-winning director Jack Serio loves intimate, nontraditional venues — like the lofts where he staged his breakthrough production of “Uncle Vanya” — and he has one for this new play by Ken Urban (“Nibbler”). With the audience at close range, arrayed around a living-room-like space, Ryan Spahn and Juan Castano play a married couple enduring a sexual dry spell, and Julia Chan plays the long-lost high school girlfriend whose reappearance rattles their relationship. (Through April 20, East Village Basement)‘Glass. Kill. What If If Only. Imp.’A major production of any Caryl Churchill play becomes a reason for pilgrimage by the faithful. Now here is a program of four brief works by the 86-year-old playwright, a master of shape-shifting and the short form; three are from 2019, one from 2021. Her longtime interpreter James Macdonald, who staged Churchill’s “Top Girls” on Broadway, directs a large cast that includes the Tony Award winner Deirdre O’Connell and John Ellison Conlee. (Through May 11, Public Theater)Bailey Williams, left, and Emma Horwitz in their production of “Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods.”Lee Rayment‘Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods’The cleverly inventive, very funny playwrights Emma Horwitz (“Mary Gets Hers”) and Bailey Williams (“Events,” “Coach Coach”) are also the performers of this comedy, which appeared in an earlier form at last year’s Exponential Festival of experimental work. A co-production of New Georges, which incubated the show, and Rattlestick Theater, it is directed by Tara Elliott. (Through April 26, Here Arts Center)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Two Climate Change Plays Keep the Flames of Hope Alive

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      “Hothouse,” at Irish Arts Center, fends off despair with loopiness; “In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot,” at Playwrights Horizons, is a fuzzy world lacking depth.Critic’s Pick‘Hothouse’Through Nov. 17 at Irish Arts Center, Manhattan; irishartscenter.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.Humans have a habit of averting their gaze from danger, even when it’s upon them. Even when it’s chronic, with one emergency piling atop another.That’s what Barbara did for years and years, staying with her violent husband.“Because you want to think it’s — I don’t know,” she says to her daughter, who grew up in that terrifying home. “A blip on the radar. That things’ll go back to being normal. That all this isn’t normal.”Domestic violence is not a theme you might expect from “Hothouse,” a climate change play from the Dublin-based Malaprop Theater. It’s principally set aboard a cruise ship taking passengers to the North Pole “to say goodbye to the ice.”But this alluringly strange and spangly show, at Irish Arts Center in Manhattan, is not solely or simplistically about ecological catastrophe. It’s about self-destruction as learned behavior through generations of safeguarding failures: the harm that parents do to children, who pass that on to their own, and the harm that humans do to the planet, abdicating their duty of care.It’s like a riff on Philip Larkin’s enduring poem “This Be the Verse” — you know the one, about man handing on misery to man — except that it takes cleareyed exception to Larkin’s grim final lines: “Get out as early as you can, / And don’t have any kids yourself.”Written by Carys D. Coburn with Malaprop and directed by Claire O’Reilly, “Hothouse” is a lament for the present and an elegy for the past that keeps alight a flame of hope for the future. It’s also yet another bit of smart programming from Irish Arts Center at a time when New York’s theater scene is somewhat starved for contemporary European work.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Agreement’ and ‘Philadelphia, Here I Come!,’ Two Irish Imports

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      “Agreement,” at Irish Arts Center, and “Philadelphia, Here I Come!,” at Irish Repertory Theater, have a timeless feel, rooted in their eras and resonant in ours.In more placid times, it would be downright bizarre to classify Owen McCafferty’s political drama “Agreement” as feel-good entertainment.In these fraught, belligerent times, though, there is comfort, even a twinge of hope, in the play’s retelling of the knotty negotiations that finally made an enduring peace possible in Northern Ireland. Part of the United Kingdom, it was long violently divided between Catholics and the Protestant majority, with republicans wanting the region to join the predominantly Catholic Republic of Ireland and unionists vehemently opposed. After decades of blood-soaked warring — and bitter, sectarian score-keeping about who did what to whom — the Good Friday Agreement pointed a different way forward.It sounds like the makings of theater for wonks, doesn’t it? Seven politicians holed up together in Belfast in April 1998, battling their way toward consensus as the clock ticks down. Tony Blair, the British prime minister, has a family vacation to get to in Spain, so they need to complete the deal by Thursday. In Charlotte Westenra’s impeccably acted production for Lyric Theater, Belfast, the group blows past that deadline and a delirious dream ballet erupts — all of these exhausted people suddenly dancing.“Agreement,” at Irish Arts Center in Manhattan, is generally less colorful than that, and its barrage of contentious details can be overwhelming. But really, negotiations are stuck on the same few specifics: power sharing, economic cooperation, the decommissioning of paramilitary weapons and the release of prisoners.The show’s most teasing joke is having the career pacifist John Hume (Dan Gordon), the gentlest pol in the room, ask the audience whether there’s any need for him to explain an elusive central point yet again. Whereupon he does not clarify.“You all get it, don’t you?” Hume says, moving briskly along. “And if you haven’t — pay attention!”In the rushing current of this play, what buoys us isn’t the particularities but rather the personalities. Mo Mowlam (Andrea Irvine), the flagrantly unpretentious British secretary of state for Northern Ireland and the only woman in the mix; Gerry Adams (Chris Corrigan), the leader of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, who turns out to be good for a wisecrack at a urinal; Bertie Ahern (Ronan Leahy), the Irish premier, freshly in mourning for his mother and showing up anyway — this is a charismatic bunch.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Mysterious Case of Kitsy Rainey’ Review: A Trilogy’s Bittersweet End

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      At Irish Arts Center, the actor delivers the final installment of his solo plays about the cobbler Pat and his eccentric beloved.Falling in love came as a surprise to Pat Farnon — a late-life development he hadn’t been looking for any more than he’d been looking for the marriage proposal that set that romance in motion. When a whirlwind of a woman named Kitsy Rainey asked him to marry her even though they’d never so much as dated, he acquiesced.“The most beautiful woman that ever water washed,” Pat called her, and Kitsy cherished him right back. But how well did she allow her husband to know her?In “The Mysterious Case of Kitsy Rainey,” the bittersweet final installment of Mikel Murfi’s trilogy of solo plays about the cobbler Pat and his eccentric beloved, it is 1987 and Kitsy has been dead two years. Holed up at home in their small Irish town, avoiding company, Pat gathers his courage to open a suitcase that Kitsy had forbidden him to look inside while she was alive.What he finds changes his understanding of her, and not just from the newspaper clipping suggesting her involvement in a long-ago crime, in the place where she was born and came of age. Or as their good friend Huby says, comically, after he reads the article: “It might be best, Pat, if we don’t try to put two and two together here.”Pat, though, has always had a quick and busy mind. The narrator of this play and its boisterously funny predecessors, “The Man in the Woman’s Shoes” and “I Hear You and Rejoice” (all currently running at Irish Arts Center, in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan), Pat can speak to us, the audience, inside his head, but he cannot speak in life, nor can he read.He is, however, an accomplished listener, and Murfi, the plays’ author, director and shape-shifting star, is a marvel of characterization and vocalization, his repertoire including uncanny instrumentals and animal sounds. This is what allows him to populate Pat’s world so richly.It is risky, then, for “The Mysterious Case” to spend as much time as it does with Pat in solitude, contemplating his own deterioration and intermittently listening to a cassette tape that Kitsy made for him and left in that suitcase.And as emotionally honest as it is to let us feel Kitsy’s absence, dramatically it is far less interesting to hear her recorded voice than to watch Murfi become her. When he embodies Kitsy in a memory, even fleetingly, the show zings with life.Irish Arts Center advises that each play works as a stand-alone, but that isn’t true of “The Mysterious Case,” which seems to know that, opening with a verbal montage of standout lines from the first two shows: a kind of “Previously on ‘Kitsy Rainey’” nudge to our recollection.It would be a mistake to come to this play without an existing affection for and curiosity about Kitsy. But if you have those, Murfi has answers to sate you — even as you watch Pat, in his anger and pain, try to reconcile her love with her tenacious secrecy.The Mysterious Case of Kitsy RaineyThrough Nov. 18 at Irish Arts Center, Manhattan; irishartscenter.org. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. More

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      ‘Good Vibrations’ Review: The Saving Power of Punk

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      In a big-hearted musical about a 1970s Belfast record store owner and the punk movement he nurtured, music is the real hero.On a nighttime street in 1970s Belfast, Northern Ireland, a D.J. named Terri Hooley runs into a pair of local toughs — young men who’ve found their purpose in the gunfire and explosions of a sectarian conflict pitting Protestants against Catholics.That strife defines everything around Terri, but his life’s meaning comes from music: the Hank Williams songs of his childhood; the rock and reggae that became his soundtrack later on.“Do your feet a favor,” he tells the toughs. “Take them dancing, like you used to.”Is it bad to call a punk rock musical charming? I hope not, because “Good Vibrations” — a biomusical about the real Terri Hooley, who became the idealistic, stalwart champion of Belfast’s nascent punk scene — absolutely is. Directed by Des Kennedy for the Lyric Theater, Belfast, it portrays music as a defiantly joyous refuge from ugliness and danger. Far from romanticizing mayhem, it presents Northern Irish punk as a youthful life force in opposition to it.Adapted by Colin Carberry and Glenn Patterson from their 2012 film of the same name, “Good Vibrations” (not to be confused with the Broadway jukebox musical also of the same name, set to Beach Boys tunes) transports the movie’s righteous sense of pleasure and freedom to the stage at Irish Arts Center, in Manhattan.Glen Wallace stars as Terri, a stubborn dreamer with zero business sense who opens a record shop, Good Vibrations, in Belfast’s city center — and makes a deal with fighters on both sides that they will leave him alone. Soon he’s putting out records by local punk bands, because no one else will, and promoting them to the world. His marriage to the lovely Ruth Carr (Jayne Wisener) suffers for it; his passion is consumed by the shop and the punks.Terri’s bands — Rudi, the Outcasts, the Undertones — don’t snarl in their rebellion, though. They’re sunnier than that, and so is this show. It’s also a little chaotic, as befits Terri’s life, and not always as clear as it needs to be. It could be that its creators are inhibited by the ethical obligations of telling a story inspired by real people. Still, this is a tonic of a musical.Grace Smart’s set makes clever use of instrument cases, Gillian Lennox’s period costumes are impeccable and the use of music as underscore can be hauntingly gorgeous. (The musical director is Katie Richardson.) In a cast that does a lot of doubling, Marty Maguire is a protean standout as Terri’s socialist dad and several other characters.As much as “Good Vibrations” is about Terri, its ultimate hero might be music itself, in whose saving, salving power he believes unwaveringly.“This is missionary work,” Terri says, in his D.J. days.So it is. Preach.Good VibrationsThrough July 16 at Irish Art Center, Manhattan; irishartscenter.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      A Stage Musical About Belfast’s Punk Oasis

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      Of all the streets to open a record store, one nicknamed Bomb Alley might not have been optimal. Then again this was Belfast in 1977, when the nationalistic, sectarian violence known as the Troubles made retail perilous pretty much everywhere.The situation did not deter Terri Hooley, who welcomed warring Protestants and Catholics to the shop he had optimistically called Good Vibrations.“It was like a little oasis in a sea of madness,” Hooley, 74, said in a recent video conversation from Belfast.The story of a lone man bridging warring communities is the kind of feel-good tale you can easily imagine as a movie, and lo and behold, it became one: “Good Vibrations” (2012), starring Richard Dormer (“Game of Thrones,” “Fortitude”) as Hooley. Colin Carberry and Glenn Patterson then adapted their own screenplay into a stage musical for Belfast’s Lyric Theater, whose most recent production of the show is running at the Irish Arts Center in Manhattan until July 16.The show, in which members of the cast take turns playing in the onstage band, follows the odyssey of Hooley (played by Glen Wallace) as he started the shop then a label that released early singles by the Undertones and the Outcasts. It also portrays the toll his obsession took on his marriage to the poet Ruth Carr (Jayne Wisener).“It actually helps you understand what Northern Ireland is now, what Northern Ireland had been,” the musical’s director, Des Kennedy, said. “It’s a real snapshot of that conflict without being about the conflict.”Hooley discovered the power of music at a young age. “My history starts in 1965 in the Maritime Hotel with Van Morrison and Them,” he said, mentioning one of the biggest stars to ever come out of Northern Ireland. “The ’60s were very colorful for me. Then the Troubles came, and the 1970s were black and white, and horrific.”Glen Wallace, center, as Terri Hooley in the musical “Good Vibrations” at the Irish Arts Center in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHis solution was to create a place that would welcome all. “Terri is a true radical,” Patterson said via video from Belfast. “He really believes in the power of transformation, about betterment, about enjoyment, about living to your full potential.”Hooley, a fan of Hank Williams and the Shangri-Las, was at first confounded by punk, but he quickly embraced the scene, which was blowing up in Belfast just as it was in London or New York.The movement, however, had a different resonance in Northern Ireland.“So much of the emphasis then was on what you couldn’t do,” Carberry said of Belfast in a joint chat with Patterson. “You can’t go to that school, you can’t live on that street, you can’t support that football team, you can’t have that friend, you can’t go out with that person — it was all about narrowing options.“Punk music,” he continued, “was about opening up options: Expand your record collection, expand your group of friends and ultimately expand how you look at the world.”Eventually, Hooley decided to expand beyond the store. Remembering great Northern Irish bands in the 1960s who had never made it to the studio, he didn’t want the new generation to be similarly erased.So he started the Good Vibrations label to help preserve the legacy of bands like the Outcasts, Rudi, Protex and most notably the Undertones, who were based 70 miles away in Derry. A couple of the best scenes in “Good Vibrations” actually revolve around the Undertones’ “Teenage Kicks,” which was so clearly an instant classic that the taste-making BBC DJ John Peel played it twice in a row during a 1978 broadcast.A scene from the film “Good Vibrations,” with Richard Dormer, right, as Terri Hooley.Cinematic Collection /Alamy Stock PhotoLike many of the Northern Irish punk songs, “Teenage Kicks” celebrated the headiness of being young, rather than spewing out bile: Those kids didn’t have to sing about aggression — they were living it.“Across the years, people were trying to avoid talking about politics in Northern Ireland,” said the show’s music director, Katie Richardson, who is 34. “Young people were like, ‘We’re sick of this, we want to talk about love, we want to talk about the positive things.’ For me and my generation of musicians, it was the same: Nobody wanted to talk about the Troubles.”Not that love was doing all that great in Hooley’s own home: His passion for music came at a cost to his relationship with Ruth. “The night that Terri’s first daughter was born, he wasn’t at the hospital; he was at a Siouxsie Sioux gig in Belfast, hanging out backstage,” Kennedy said. The show does find a bit more room for Ruth as a poet, and for the couple’s friends Dave and Marilyn Hyndman (Darren Franklin and Cat Barter).As Northern Ireland recently celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement that ended the Troubles, Carberry noted that the commemorations largely focused on the leaders at the negotiation table, to the detriment of the groups and individuals who had tried so hard to make a difference on a smaller scale.“In a way, ‘Good Vibrations’ is a celebration of those people,” Carberry said. “This is a story about ordinary people who tried to live a different way, and tried to help others live a different way.” More

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      ‘Chekhov’s First Play’ Review: A Play-by-Play of the Play Within the Play

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      At Irish Arts Center, a wry, experimental iteration doesn’t do much to untangle the playwright’s unwieldy early work.If Anton Chekhov gave a name to the early play that surfaced years after his death, we don’t know what it was. This is part of the lore around that script, a relished detail in the story of its discovery: The title page was missing.The text is a mammoth, unwieldy beast, as playwrights’ juvenilia often is. Written when Chekhov was 18, or 19, or 20 — that fact is uncertain, too — it’s a stylistic mishmash that would run five or six hours, staged whole. But dramatists are drawn to it, in part because its elements are recognizable from his later work: the grand old estate, the money woes, the crowd of characters living restless, listless lives. And, of course, the gun.So adapters dive in, gather what they like and leave the rest. Michael Frayn called his rendition “Wild Honey.” David Hare’s is “Platonov,” which is the usual title for the play in English. And if you remember the amusing spectacle of Cate Blanchett, on Broadway nearly six years ago, removing her bra without taking off her dress — well, then you’ve seen the version known as “The Present,” by Andrew Upton.“Chekhov’s First Play,” at the Irish Arts Center in Hell’s Kitchen, is Bush Moukarzel and Ben Kidd’s wry, experimental iteration. Directed by the pair for Dead Centre — their Dublin company, familiar to New York audiences for the shows “Lippy” and “Hamnet” — it whittles Chekhov’s script down to a bare 70 minutes. That includes time for the location to shift from the late 19th-century Russian countryside to early 21st-century Dublin, and for a wrecking ball and a pneumatic drill to do some damage to Andrew Clancy’s scenery.Languor escalates into havoc for the characters — among them Anna (Ali White), the financially indebted owner of a house she can’t afford; her friend Triletsky (Paul Reid), who, like Chekhov, is a doctor with tuberculosis that he fails to diagnose; and Platonov, who arrives quite late, played by an audience member. Not that you are likely to care much about the characters, let alone the plot, as story is not exactly at the forefront here. The performance we watch is, in a sense, the play within the play.The whole experience is framed by Moukarzel’s running commentary, spoken into audience members’ ears via the headphones we wear throughout. (Sound design is by Jimmy Eadie and Kevin Gleeson.) It’s funny and often snarky; in one slightly crude line, Moukarzel sounds like a sports broadcaster giving a play-by-play of a rare Chekhov move. But Moukarzel also expounds on the themes of the play — like private property and the ravenousness of the rich — and laments that he cut so many characters from Chekhov’s script.“It was hard to decide what matters,” he says, “and who you can just throw away.”This, really, is the nub of “Chekhov’s First Play,” which had its premiere in 2015. That’s also when Irish artists were sifting through the human wreckage of the Celtic Tiger, an economic boom that collapsed into painful recession and left Ireland littered with abandoned housing developments.When these characters talk of cancer, it’s a metaphor for harmful, unchecked growth; their scorn for banks is rooted in reckless lending that ruined lives. Even Moukarzel and Kidd’s decision not to give the Chekhov play a proper title is significant — because of that other meaning of title: legal ownership. Historically, one name for the found Chekhov text has been “Play Without a Title.”Trouble is, the Celtic Tiger is so many crises removed from the present that it’s a little obscure, even at the Irish Arts Center, which co-commissioned the play.Similarly, the headphones would have been novel in 2015 — the year that downtown theatergoers experienced Anne Washburn’s “10 out of 12” that way, and the year before Simon McBurney’s “The Encounter” gobsmacked headphone-wearing Broadway audiences with its binaural sound design. Now, as a tool, they’re underwhelming.“Chekhov’s First Play” surely felt much bolder and fresher when it was new. But if you ask the question “Why this show now?” the answer seems to be that it was in the wings.Chekhov’s First PlayThrough Nov. 6 at the Irish Arts Center, Manhattan; irishartscenter.org. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. More

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      Live Performance Is Back. But Audiences Have Been Slow to Return.

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      Attendance lagged in the comeback season, as the challenges posed by the coronavirus persisted. Presenters hope it was just a blip.Patti LuPone, Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig came back to Broadway. The Norwegian diva-in-the-making Lise Davidsen brought her penetrating voice to the Metropolitan Opera. Dancers filled stages, symphonies reverberated in concert halls and international theater companies returned to American stages.The resumption of live performance after the long pandemic shutdown brought plenty to cheer about over the past year. But far fewer people are showing up to join those cheers than presenters had hoped.Around New York, and across the country, audiences remain well below prepandemic levels. From regional theaters to Broadway, and from local orchestras to grand opera houses, performing arts organizations are reporting persistent — and worrisome — drops in attendance.Fewer than half as many people saw a Broadway show during the season that recently ended than did so during the last full season before the coronavirus pandemic. The Met Opera saw its paid attendance fall to 61 percent of capacity, down from 75 percent before the pandemic. Many regional theaters say ticket sales are down significantly.“There was a greater magnetic force of people’s couches than I, as a producer, anticipated,” said Jeremy Blocker, the managing director at New York Theater Workshop, the Off Broadway theater that developed “Rent” and “Hadestown.” “People got used to not going places during the pandemic, and we’re going to struggle with that for a few years.”Many presenters anticipate that the softer box office will extend into the upcoming season and perhaps beyond. And some fear that the virus is accelerating long-term trends that have troubled arts organizations for years, including softer ticket sales for many classical music events, the decline of the subscription model for selling tickets at many performing arts organizations, and the increasing tendency among consumers to purchase tickets at the last minute.A few institutions are already making adjustments for the new season: The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra has cut 10 concerts, after seeing its average attendance fall to 40 percent of capacity last season, down from 62 percent in 2018-19.Many Broadway shows have struggled to match prepandemic salesPercent change in weekly gross sales in 2021 and 2022, compared with the same week in 2019 More

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      ‘The Same’ Review: Do You See What I See?

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      Enda Walsh’s play, which had its U.S. premiere at the Irish Arts Center, stars two sisters who play different versions of the same character.Imagine that on one otherwise normal day, while going about your normal activities, you encounter someone who looks uncannily familiar — it’s you. Does the discovery cause you discomfort or give you relief? Are you met with assurance or fear?It’s the situation a woman named Lisa — well, two women named Lisa — face in “The Same,” by Enda Walsh, that opened on Sunday for its U.S. premiere, at the Irish Arts Center in Manhattan.The Corcadorca Theater Company production stars Catherine Walsh and Eileen Walsh, who are sisters in real life (with no relation to Enda Walsh), as two expressions of Lisa. The younger Lisa recounts her recent arrival to a new city and what is presumably a mental health facility. She occasionally leaves her “small blue room,” as she calls it, for errands or groceries or, on one particular day, to take a job helping prepare for a repast after a funeral. There she meets the woman who shares her face and her memories: her future self.The two Lisas sit, stand and pace, reminiscing about their childhood. They speak in a steady back-and-forth, trading lines and swapping roles in what feels less like a conversation than a team recitation of a story they both know by heart. Their dialogue reflects a constantly changing perspective; sometimes they speak in the first person, sometimes the second, sometimes the third, as though each Lisa is, even individually, too fragmented to maintain a consistent point of view.The production, directed by Pat Kiernan, runs a trim 50 minutes, less than the time it takes to get from some corners of Brooklyn to the Irish Arts Center’s swanky new Midtown location on 11th Avenue.The set design, by Owen Boss, is immersive. It feels like a waiting room; the audience sits in upholstered chairs and love seats arranged in a loose square on a patch of carpet, giving a sense of the contours of a room. There’s a bookcase, a potted plant, and around and alongside the seats are signs of interrupted progress: tables cluttered with half-empty mugs of coffee and half-eaten cookies and an unfinished game of solitaire. The seating faces the center of the space, where the two actors spend most of the play. It’s novel to sit among the action, with one Lisa or another shuffling past your seat, though ultimately the effect doesn’t support its execution.Kiernan’s direction, however, imbues the production with an unsettling feeling: The actresses mirror each other in ways that aren’t always exact replications but rather variations on themes. And so there’s an interplay among their postures, movements and energies — younger Lisa gets worked up and older Lisa is calm, until she, too, gets worked up and younger Lisa becomes subdued. Michael Hurley’s lighting design and Peter Power’s sound design also seem triggered by the volatility of the Lisas’ minds. Kiernan has some of the set’s effects suddenly spring to life — two TV sets suspended in the corners of the room awaken to show clips from a game show or an episode of “Judge Judy,” a bingo machine whirs to life and then chaotically spews its contents on the floor.The success of the play’s Gemini effect is in large part because of the actresses’ talents. Eileen’s performance is jittery, her version of Lisa so full of neuroses that she seems like a shaken can of soda, fizzing just beneath the surface. Catherine gives off a similar, though more muted, anxiety; her Lisa embodies a different type of pressure, one of a dam carefully constructed over the years, pushing back against the waves crashing against its walls.Walsh’s script, however, doesn’t leave as lasting an impression. The play, which was originally commissioned by Corcadorca in celebration of the company’s 25th anniversary, has the usual signatures of the playwright, whose most recent New York production was the arresting “Medicine,” starring Domhnall Gleeson, at St. Ann’s Warehouse. There’s an intentional obliqueness, the traces of a narrative that are blurred and contorted by the characters. It all comes back to the slippery nature of the playwright’s language, which is full of repetition and half-formed ideas; sentences have some unspoken antecedent or trail off, spiraling inward to form an ouroboros of thoughts.But Walsh typically uses those linguistic maneuvers to add more shades to his text; rarely is he interested in a singular theme or mode of storytelling. Here, the short run time prevents him from getting too complicated, but the result is a script that, though still unconventional, is limited.How does a person grow from trauma? What happens when she resolves to leave part of herself behind, only to re-encounter that part unexpectedly? “The Same” circles these questions but never reaches a sharp point. It’s almost as though the play gets trapped simply gazing in the mirror.The SameThrough March 6 at the Irish Arts Center, Manhattan; irishartscenter.org. Running time: 50 minutes. More