Review: OUTSIDE MULLINGAR at Theatre Artists Studio

There are productions that succeed because the script is strong, and productions that succeed because performers manage to elevate familiar material. Theatre Artists Studio’s production of John Patrick Shanley’s OUTSIDE MULLINGAR achieves something rarer: a complete unity of tone, performance, language, and emotional truth.

Shanley situates the play in the confined geography of a rural Irish farmhouse kitchen, where questions about land, inheritance, and ownership are points of tension. A long-standing grievance over a small but consequential piece of property becomes the catalyst for a larger reckoning. Within this enclosed space, a father’s doubts about his son’s ability to sustain the land of their lineage sit alongside a history of withheld connections and unresolved resentments. Running alongside this dynamic is the fraught relationship between Rosemary and Tony, in which long-standing mutual feelings are repeatedly suppressed by pride and fear.

Under the direction of Polly Chapman, the production resists both sentimentality and broad comedy, finding instead the balance Shanley’s writing requires. The play’s power lies in its blend of awkwardness and yearning, humor and regret, stubbornness and grace. Chapman works with restraint, allowing her cast to move within the contours of Shanley’s language and its rhythms. As a result, the emotional tensions of the piece emerge naturally from characters who have spent entire lives learning what not to say. Thus, the production is deeply moving without ever appearing to strain for effect.

In Amanda Noel Trombley’s hands, Rosemary Muldoon is far more than an eccentric romantic heroine. Beneath her sharp-tongued comebacks and outspokenness lies a decades-long love for Anthony that has survived his emotional evasions, silences, and near-total obliviousness. Trombley reveals Rosemary as wounded yet ferociously intelligent, emotionally fearless, and deeply courageous. Her performance carries both the ache and absurdity of a woman who has waited far too long to speak plainly. She never turns Rosemary into caricature; even in her most heightened comedic moments, her emotional truth remains intact. By the play’s final movements, she commands the stage with extraordinary authority.

Opposite her, David Lorello gives Anthony an intense and carefully calibrated authenticity. His performance is so unforced that it’s easy to overlook how technically exact it is. Lorello understands that Anthony’s inwardness and awkwardness reflect fear: fear of exposure, of inadequacy, of being truly seen. A 42-year-old farmer who believes himself fundamentally unsuited to the life he has inherited, Anthony carries the private conviction that he is somehow cursed, and incapable of loving the land.

Brad Allen, portraying Anthony’s father Tony, makes the character’s bluntness and buried sorrow feel inseparable, shaping a portrait of a man confronting mortality, disappointment, and love he has never adequately expressed. In the play’s father-son dynamic, affection is never absent, but it is continually filtered through judgment, pride, and the difficulty of recognition.

And Judy Rollings, one of the enduring treasures of the Phoenix stage, gives Aoifa remarkable texture and wit. She possesses that increasingly rare theatrical gift of making every line sound discovered in the moment.

What is striking throughout is the effortlessness of the ensemble. Nothing feels manufactured. Nothing reaches for applause. The performances are pure gold.

Visually, the production is equally effective and evocative. Jeff Chapman’s set design extends beyond the stage itself, creating an environment rather than merely a backdrop. The world of the play begins before the audience fully settles into their seats. The sweeping farm-field mural by Maia Landau establishes an atmosphere shaped by memory, weather, distance, and inheritance. Together, they suggest the psychic landscape of rural Ireland as much as its physical one.

And Shanley’s writing (Doubt, Defiance, Storefront Church) remains its own kind of miracle.

Few contemporary playwrights capture human contradiction with such lyric clarity. Shanley writes people who wound each other accidentally, who hide tenderness beneath irritation, who weaponize humor against loneliness. There is music in his dialogue, marked by the cadence of souls struggling toward connection. In this production, that lyricism is fully honored.

As Theatre Artists Studio closes its 20th Season, already distinguished by ambitious and intelligent work, this production feels like a culminating statement of artistic identity. Theatre Artists Studio has long occupied a singular place in the Phoenix theater community: intimate, actor-centered, serious about text, and unafraid of emotional depth. With OUTSIDE MULLINGAR, the company ends the season on a high note, a master class in acting, bringing the essence of human experience to center stage…and that, in these times, is more than enough.

OUTSIDE MULLINGAR runs through May 31st at:

Theatre Artists Studio -- https://www.thestudiophx.org/ -- 12406 N. Paradise Village Parkway E, Scottsdale, AZ -- 602-765-0120

Photo credit to TAS – Clockwise: Brad Allen and Amanda Noel Trombley; David Lorello and Trombley; Allen and Lorello; Judy Rollings and Lorello

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