Irishtown Off-Broadway Reviews

At its most chaotic, Irishtown brings to mind Noises Off, that classic farce about staging a play within a play in the British hinterland. Comedy, as they say, is hard; and it takes tremendous discipline and timing to pull it off. Under the tight direction of Nicola Murphy Dubey the company mostly meets the challenge though the humor occasionally seems forced. Still it’s quite a trip watching talented actors frantically portraying desperate actors acting badly.

Irishtown is like a mashup of The Play That Goes Wrong (there’ s lot of slapstick humor) and a takedown of the pretentious creative process. The tension is maintained as we wait to see will-they-or-won’t-they come up with a new Irish masterpiece. Perhaps, with some light editing, we might even be watching the said masterpiece or at least a very good night of theater.

If you’ve had the pleasure of attending performances at the Irish Repertory Theatre, you’ve grown accustomed to certain recurring themes and tropes in the grand tradition of Irish drama: domestic disputes that unfold in either Dublin or the remote countryside, with detours to the local pub of course, and feature the eventual revelation of long-buried family secrets. Ciara Elizabeth Smyth’s Irishtown, a wise craic-ing new comedy at the Irish Rep, is an affectionate and often hilarious riff on the genre’s many go-to clichés.