Irish Heritage Theatre presents 'The Women of Ireland'

That pervading sense of unevenness may come from having too many cooks in the kitchen. Three women — Tina Brock, Marcia Ferguson, and Tori Mittleman — share directorial duties, and each approaches her assignment sui generis. But taken together, the plays cry out for connections between the myth-steeped poetry of the old world and the bustle of contemporary urban Irish life.

Today's Ireland

Brock comes closest to capturing a consistent style across three plays culled from Tiny Plays for Ireland, a collection of shorts commissioned by Dublin theater company Fishamble. Hearts, a brief curtain-raiser by Lucy Montague-Moffatt, effectively skewers Irish mores, as two middle-aged women (Mary Pat Walsh and Jackie Cohen) commiserate over their desire to knit themselves a perfect man.

Walsh and Cohen play the scene while pulling laundry from a clothesline. They complain about useless husbands and ungrateful children. A constant soundtrack of birdsong (by Jack Zaferes and Derek Gertz) plays throughout.

Montague-Moffatt’s dialogue has the right amount of snap, and Walsh especially excels at playing up the tropes of a long-suffering mam. Hearts shows a level of self-aware humor rarely seen in a genre known for wearing seriousness on its sleeve.

Joan Ryan’s Isolation, played entirely in the dark, and Antonia Hart’s Poster Boy address issues of detachment and cynicism in modern-day Dublin. Neither work is particularly memorable, but each reminds the audience that there’s more to Ireland than bogs and potato fields. And Carlos Forbes makes a notably strong impression in Poster Boy as a young man separated from his mother (Cohen) by a wide generational gulf.

Yesterday's classics

The program errs in its presentation of two Irish classics. John Middleton Synge’s Riders to the Sea benefits from a harrowing performance by Walsh as Maurya, a woman whose husband and five sons have all died by drowning. She reflects on the cruelty of the elements as she waits for the inevitable news that her sixth son, Bartley, has also perished. The play shows Synge at his most lyrical, blending influences of Celtic paganism and symbolist imagery.

Unfortunately, Mittleman doesn’t trust the material to cast its own spell. She inserts shadow puppetry into Maurya’s long narrative of loss and grief, creating moments of unintentional humor. A group of masked figures festooned in red cloth bursts into Maurya’s humble hovel to symbolize death literally. These unsubtle choices rob the piece of its poetry.

If Riders to the Sea suffers from too many ideas, Ferguson’s treatment of W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory’s Cathleen Ní Houlihan presents too few. Set against the failed Rebellion of 1798, Cathleen is equal parts ghost story and nationalist agitprop. Yeats and Gregory depict a young groom (Brian McManus) tempted to the battlefield by a mysterious, unnamed old woman (Cohen). She, of course, is Cathleen — a symbol of Ireland who bemoans the loss of her “four green fields” and the presence of “too many strangers in my house.”

The play requires a balance between realism and supernaturalism that Ferguson never quite strikes. Cathleen should be an intoxicating, otherworldly presence, but Cohen’s performance remains resolutely earthbound. McManus manages to capture some of his character’s idealistic fervor, but he’s mostly acting in a vacuum. The groom’s parents, played by Walsh and John Cannon, fail to communicate the sad knowledge that their son has left them for certain death.

Based on the work at hand, I would have nominated Brock to direct the entire evening. Her affinity for taming difficult, abstract works would have been put to good use here. But I probably would have selected another set of plays altogether.