The play's title is the way the family refers to Millie's mother, Mai (Melina McGrew), whose grand home above the haunted Owl Lake in Connemara, Ireland, provides the setting for the action. The story opens with the return of Mai's philandering husband, Robert (Justin McConnaughy), who left Mai and their four children five years earlier to chase women and his music. Mai has scrimped and struggled to care for the children and build the house on the lake to lure Robert home, hoping, as Millie says, it might be "the magic thread that would stitch us back together."
We also meet Mai's sisters: Connie (Sarah Barton), who resents the overachieving Mai and has settled for a quiet if uninspired domestic life, and Beck (Lauren Balmer), who's back from Australia on a holiday, only to confess that the carefree life she tried to make for herself there has been a failure. We're treated to hilarious visits from disapproving Aunties Julie (a terrific Lisa Foley) and Agnes (Charlotte Peed), and the wisdom of the opium-smoking Grandma Fraochlan, who reduces life to the fundamentals: "You're born, you have sex, you die."
With all the family dynamics, "The Mai" might sound like an Irish version of TV's "Brothers and Sisters," but Carr's language is so rich in imagery and mythology, she gives the story a dreamy, ethereal tone. Carr's other plays, including the haunting "Portia Coughlan," "By the Bog of Cats," and "On Raftery's Hill," all swim in storytelling laden with symbolism, sexual politics, and an impending sense of doom, but the women she's brought to life here are fascinating for their self-awareness and their inability to avoid the traps they know are set for them.
Janie Howland's living-room set only suggests the opulence Mai is trying to achieve and hints at the view (the gossipy aunts say "you could have bought a picture [of it] and hung it on the wall"), but Hussey's use of the large playing area makes it feel that no matter how spacious it is, the home is still a claustrophobic prison where the increasingly desperate characters stalk one another.
Fed on tales of Grandma Fraochlan's Sultan of Spain father and her beloved husband, the nine-fingered fisherman, the women of "The Mai" yearn for exotic and unattainable lives. By the time the sisters admit "our lives are far from fairy tales, but we're not dead yet," we already know Mai's fate. Though Carr doesn't achieve the heart-wrenching family destruction of, say, Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey into Night," she has crafted a remarkable gathering of women whose stories are both frustrating and engaging.
