For Love

By Gwen Orel

When we saw Laoisa Sexton's sharp and funny comedy "For Love" when it played during the 1st Irish Festival last fall, we called it the "pick of the Festival... It was tightly constructed, hilariously performed, strongly directed, and brought a fresh take to stories of 30-something friendship and sex."

I'm happy to report that it has lost nothing and gained in the re-viewing in its run at Irish Repertory Theatre (irishrep.org), prior to an Irish tour. The run closes on April 5.

Warning: there's some adult language in this review.

As I pointed out then, society has a bias against plays about love and sex that puts them on the level of "sit com," and therefore to be taken less seriously, than plays about death, aging, etc. That's a shame, because when imagined with heart and honesty, as the stories are in "For Love," plays like this can be equally if not more powerful than those that touch on Heavy Issues. There's a danger, of course, in devolving into farce and silliness. There's a little bit of that in "For Love," with some fantasy scenes at a disco, but there're also scenes that demonstrate loneliness, yearning and a hunger connection that can't be filled with fried chicken, though Val, played by the completely delightful Jo Kinsella, tries.

There are no easy answers for the Dublin lovers here, not for Val, nor for Bee (played with a sweet air of confusion by the author herself), nor for Tina (Georgina McKevitt), in love with shopping instead of her husband and worried she's lost her appetite for sex. Even the married guy in a BMW, played by boxer-turned-actor John Duddy, who's almost hilariously handsome, is not Bad with a capital B. He's lonesome. He might have been leading Bee on, or he might be sincere, but this married artist certainly seems to be looking for something.

And what is love, anyway? What is sexual attraction? Nobody really knows. Bee nervously describes a childhood pet of a dead eel to her would-be lover Aidan, and she's not just filling the space between them. She longs to be understood, especially as she's about to be a granny, though only in her 30s. Her friend Val, whose own father walked out on her family when she was little, rages against the infidelity implied by Bee even going out on a date with Aidan - until she doesn't. There's a wonderfully comic subplot involving "Tub a'guts," the bank manager where Val and Bee work, who is also Tina's husband, which has a surprisingly sweet love tap in it.

Tim Ruddy directs, making good use of the downstairs space at Irish Rep, occasionally having the actors almost right on top of us. Ruddy, an actor himself, has an exceptional hand for plays like this, and for those of Conal Creedon a few years back, that depend on subtle inner moments made visible.

With "Sex and the City" and "Girls" there has been a welcome interest in plays about love and sex from a female point of view. The market is not yet glutted. "For Love" remains the only play I've ever seen in which a man trying to seduce a woman ends up getting her off, and not himself. That's hard to write in a review, and I can't fathom the courage it took to write it and then act the scene, as Laoisa Sexton does. She's a force to be reckoned with.

Read our full earlier review here.

The play closes at Irish Rep on April 5. It will run in Ireland on the following dates:
April 8-13 The Derry Playhouse/As part of UK City of Culture 2013
April 15-20/21 Grand Opera House/The Baby Grand Belfast
April 22/23 Theatre Royal, Waterford
April 24/25 Axis, Ballymun- Dublin
April 29- May 4 The Viking Theater, Dublin
May 7/8 The TownHall Theater/Black box Galway

The producers ask for you to like the show on Facebook, too.

Gwen Orel runs the blog and podcast, New York Irish Arts