Entertainment

Irish play low on luck

Jon Fletcher woos Wrenn Schmidt in “Katie Roche,” an uneven revival of an obscure Irish play. (Richard Termine)

The Mint company is an expert in excavation, mining forgotten nuggets from the theatrical rubble. Usually choices are made on a case-by-case basis: an obscure American comedy here, an overlooked English melodrama there.

But the Mint took a different tack with its Teresa Deevy project. It engaged in a multi-year crusade on behalf of this Irish playwright — whom you can’t even call forgotten since she was never known in the US in the first place.

“Katie Roche” is the third and last offering in a cycle that began with the excellent, poignant “Wife to James Whelan” in 2010 and continued with 2011’s flawed but thought-provoking “Temporal Powers.”

You’d think they’d save the best for last, especially since “Katie Roche” is Deevy’s best-known play: A critical hit at Dublin’s famed Abbey Theatre in 1936, it’s been revived semiregularly across the Atlantic. But the production that opened last night, directed at a slow pace by Jonathan Bank, struggles to make poor Katie’s life interesting.

Deevy often wrote of poor women trying to escape their circumstances, cornered by overbearing men and judgmental neighbors.

Like them, Katie Roche (Wrenn Schmidt) doesn’t have it easy. She’s never met her father, and works as a servant to Amelia Gregg (Margaret Daly). Not surprisingly, her prospects are limited: She can remain a maid, enter the convent or wed.

A marriage proposal by Amelia’s brother, Stanislaus (Patrick Fitzgerald), seems like the least bad option — never mind that he’s much older and as grim as an undertaker. Katie’s become convinced that she comes from grand stock, and so she picks the respectable Stanislaus over Michael Maguire (Jon Fletcher), a local lad whose main selling point is his roguish charm.

“I’m done with humble,” Katie claims. “I was meant to be proud.”

If only she actually did something about it. Instead, she boasts a childlike, naive passivity that can be maddening. The willowy Schmidt has a delicate grace, but it’s hard to empathize with her character.

The play is at its most forceful in its last third, when Katie submits to a pair of dominant men: her newly discovered dad, the religious Reuben (Jamie Jackson), and Stanislaus, the husband who becomes a father figure. She just can’t escape the limitations imposed by her social status, her sex and her own temperament. The show isn’t always easy to take in, but Deevy’s refusal to give her heroine an out certainly is uncompromising.