Sean Bell, Kate Mulgrew, Ayana Workman and Zach Appelman Photo by Carol Rosegg

On Colm McNally's attractive set (he also did the lovely lighting, subtly suggesting changes of day) depicting Beiv's airy, modern seaside cottage and studio, Colm, on his first visit in many years, has brought a surprise: a bride, Bonnie (Ayana Workman). She's Californian, enthusiastic, eager to please, and a decade or so his junior. She's bubbly and positive and seems destined to live out her days as a dear little wifey, though she's also studying Jungian psychology. In short, she's unformed. This doesn't sit well with Beiv, who's of the firm opinion that "No one in their right mind should get married before 30."

But then, Beiv's of a lot of firm opinions, and a lot of things don't sit well with her. Mulgrew, trudging warily across the stage and wringing laughs out of lines that might challenge most other actors, presents a tough old bird who decided her career constituted most of her life, and isn't apologizing to anybody for it. Harris metes out Beiv's history in dribs and drabs, and her exposition can be on the club-footed side. We quickly get this much: Beiv's late ex-husband vanished in a boating accident under mysterious circumstances that left her something of a suspect, though she's always maintained that he was, if nothing else, "my very best friend." The intrigue over his death hasn't disappeared, though, and somebody's even doing a podcast about it. Plus, Beiv's sexuality has proved quite malleable: Sometime around her husband's demise, she founded a women's colony, and evidently diddled quite a few of them.

Colm's sexuality isn't as clear-cut as it first appears, either. He had a long-ago but fervent dalliance with Donal (Sean Bell), a local who's been assisting Beiv's gut reno, and who never got over Colm. Compared with the other characters, Colm seems levelheaded and reasonable, and Bell plays him very well, a mixture of get-on-with-it practicality and long-repressed lust. There's one other character: Ray (David Mattar Merten), the podcaster, who's described as being from South Dublin but whose accent suggests it might just as easily be South Bronx, and whose impact on the proceedings is so incidental, you wonder why Harris bothered with him.

Last season, in Mother Play, Jessica Lange had an eight-minute solo scene where she said nothing and revealed everything, a silent woman-adrift ballet where each gesture, each movement, meant something. It was riveting. Here, Mulgrew has a five-minute setting-the-table solo (Beiv has invited Colm, Bonnie, and Donal to dinner, to try to ease some of the distemper among them), and it's excruciating. On with the tablecloth, exit to kitchen. On with the cutlery, exit to kitchen. Et cetera. It tells us nothing; why is it here, and why has director Marc Atkinson Borrull drawn it out so? But it does set the table, so to speak, for an Act 1 curtain, as Colm, who's been rather a jerk the whole time anyway, gets drunk over dinner and tears into Bonnie for no good reason, and it wouldn't have hurt Harris to supply a good reason.

But it does set the stage for a second act that emerges as a series of confrontations: Colm and Donal, Bonne and Donal, Beiv and Colm (one moment we've seen coming all along: She reaches out to comfort him, he quickly pulls away). Some good scene writing here, and some good playing–though to these eyes, Mulgrew and Appelman both rather overplay their final joust, and I'm not sure I'm buying either Beiv's or Colm's big speeches. But Harris has a bad habit of having her dramatis personae make subtext-free, front-and-center declarations: Donal's "I ruined my fucking life for you, Colm," or Colm's "You have always loved your art far more than you've ever loved me," to Beiv, natch. Threads are left hanging, and much as we want to believe everyone has learned something about himself, there's a curious stasis; Beiv will remain career-focused, Colm will still be a jerk, and Donal, the most appealing of this not-very-appealing bunch, well, we hope Donal will move on. There is a beacon, by the way, a big hilltop monument on the island that reminds Bonnie of a vibrator. But its lack of symbolic value leads one to suspect that Harris was just stuck for a title.

Harris seems to want to say something about the need to shut oneself off from the rest of the world in order to create (really?), and the effects of that isolation, and culture clash, as in:

Bonnie: You're being a little obnoxious.
Colm: So are you. But you're American, so you don't notice.

But the insights land only faintly, and while fans of "Star Trek: Voyager" or "Orange Is the New Black" will no doubt enjoy seeing Mulgrew ably inhabit a character who contrasts wildly with those of Captain Janeway and Red, the rest of us may get a little fidgety. Truly, Irish Rep, haven't we seen most of this before?