A Night With George

At age 48 and about to launch a dramatic new chapter in her life, Bridie Murphy needs a sounding board. She has found one, literally: a life-size cardboard cutout of George Clooney. Bridie arrives at her Belfast home in the wee hours of the morning with the flat movie-star totem under her arm. Fueled by a succession of "Belfast martinis" (vodka and Diet Coke), she proceeds to tell "George" the story of her own troubled life against the backdrop of the larger "troubles" in Northern Ireland, from the outbreak of violence in 1969 to the cease-fire in 1998. Just why Clooney has been chosen as Bridie's surrogate father confessor is never quite clear, but it hardly matters. Strikingly played by Donna O'Connor, Bridie needs no responsive audience for her impassioned 90-minute monologue. The actor, who wrote the piece with Brenda Murphy, brings Bridie to vivid life, as if the two women might have lived the same story, under the equally committed direction of Tony Devlin.

Bridie's tale begins in her teens, when she is hit in the head by a rock thrown by an Irish Republican Army rioter (which she pronounces somewhere between "rotter" and "ratter"). Despite parental disapproval, she and the rioter start going out, fall in love, and wed when she is 18 and already pregnant. His IRA activities then send him to jail for a couple of decades, while she raises their son in near poverty, ultimately gets a degree, and finds work. Thirty years on, she finds herself.

O'Connor is adept not only at creating her own indelible character but also in voicing other characters, such as Bridie's parents, her husband, their son, her co-workers, and her extended family. Non-Irish audience members may at first have trouble understanding some of the West Belfast lingo and Bridie's pronunciations, peculiar to the city she has never left, but it's worth the slog to get to know this indelible character and her working-class milieu and to root for her release from life as she's known it.

It's no fault of O'Connor the actor, but once Bridie declares her own cease-fire, finally divorces the "rotter," and gets to leave Belfast for an Italian holiday, her narrative begins to flag a bit—thanks in part to an ill-timed intermission and an unnecessary costume change. And a bit of generic cliché creeps into what has been, so far, captivatingly sui generis. (Do we really need another gay-bar karaoke rendition of "I Will Survive"?) A tighter denouement could make this already memorable play really soar.

Presented by Brassneck Theatre Company as part of 1st Irish 2011 at the Times Square Arts Center's Roy Arias Stage IV, 300 W. 43rd St., Suite 506, NYC. Sept. 8–Oct. 2. Mon., Thu.–Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m. (212) 868-4444 or www.smarttix.com.