The View from the Kitchen: "Thirst" at Irish Classical Theatre Company
- Anthony Chase
- 23 hours ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 12 hours ago
By Anthony Chase
For over half a century, audiences have been riveted by the Tyrone family's slow-motion implosion in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night, that monumental autopsy of addiction, regret, and familial recrimination set in the parlor of Monte Cristo Cottage on a single August day in 1912. But what of the people preparing the meals that go uneaten, tidying the rooms that house such misery, listening through walls to the elegant articulation of despair? Who were they, and what journeys brought them to that threshold between service and witness?
Irish playwright Ronán Noone answers these questions with Thirst, now receiving a compelling production at Irish Classical Theatre Company, and the result is a companion piece that stands on its own while deepening our understanding of the original masterwork. If Tom Stoppard gave us Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to illuminate the margins of Hamlet, Noone has crafted an Upstairs, Downstairs for the O'Neill canon that transforms footnotes into flesh and blood.
Noone's premise is deceptively simple. While the Tyrones wage their war of words in the living room, three members of the household staff navigate their own hopes and heartbreaks in the kitchen: Bridget Conroy, the cook who has weathered sixteen years in America; her newly arrived niece Cathleen Mullin, who survived the Titanic and dreams of the stage; and Jack Smythe, the chauffeur with entrepreneurial ambitions and romantic designs on Bridget.
Only Cathleen appears, briefly and drunkenly, in O'Neill's play. The other two exist merely as names, insults, passing references. Yet from these fragments, Noone has constructed three-dimensional people whose struggles mirror, counterpoint, and occasionally mock the agonies unfolding on the other side of the wall.
The playwright's own immigrant journey from Ireland to America informs every scene. As he notes in his program essay, he shares more with James O'Neill, the Irish-born patriarch whose life Eugene dramatized, than with Eugene himself. That perspective -- the pressure to prove the journey worthwhile, the fear of financial ruin, the sense of uprootedness -- pulses through Thirst. Where the Tyrones grapple with the American Dream already achieved and curdling, Noone's characters are still reaching for it, still believing in it, still willing to sacrifice for it.
The kitchen setting, realized with impressive functionality by scenic designer David Dwyer, serves multiple dramaturgical purposes. This is not some abstract suggestion of a kitchen; this is a working space with running water and functioning appliances. When Bridget cooks breakfast, the audience smells it. The physicality of the labor is made manifest, reminding us that while the Tyrones philosophize about their disappointments, someone must still prepare the meals, wash the dishes, and maintain the machinery of daily life.
But the kitchen is also a site of confinement. Despite crossing an ocean to reach America, or climbing up from the abyss, these working people find themselves in a marginal space, literally walled off from the prosperity and possibilities they seek. The back door becomes the play's most potent symbol, an escape route, a portal to fresh starts, a threshold that each character must decide whether to cross.
Kate LoConti Alcocer's direction exploits Irish Classical Theatre's theater-in-the-round configuration with evident confidence. The staging flows naturally around the space, ensuring that every seat offers an equally valid perspective on the action - a genuine accomplishment in a naturalistic kitchen drama where actors must actually cook, clean, and perform domestic tasks. Moreover, the director guides her three fine actors towards natural and charismatic performances that refuse to sentimentalize the characters.
Aleks Malejs brings a flinty, unsentimental edge to Bridget Conroy that makes the character's eventual moments of vulnerability all the more heartbreaking. We meet her drunk, but Malejs locates the shame beneath the stupor, the self-loathing that alcohol temporarily silences. Sober, she is a hanging judge, and the defendant she sentences most harshly is herself. There is a past sin that haunts her, a family in Ireland that remembers her only when they need money, and a bone-deep weariness about the American promise. Yet Malejs also finds Bridget's capacity for fierce loyalty and grudging affection. When she wields a sauce pan, it becomes an extension of her personality, practical, efficient, and occasionally threatening. It’s a grand and affecting performance.
Kai Crumley, who impressed last season in Brazen-Faced Varlets' The Early Girl, makes an exciting ICTC debut as Cathleen Mullin, providing the production with exuberant bursts of oxygen. Her character has only recently arrived from Dublin and is planning to stay only long enough to save money for her wedding back home. Cathleen carries an optimism that her aunt finds simultaneously endearing and exasperating. Crumley's physicality suggests someone still surprised by the space she's allowed to occupy; she moves through the kitchen with a reckless energy, a survivor's determination to seize life. When James Tyrone encourages her theatrical ambitions, Crumley shows us a young woman discovering possibility she hadn't dared to imagine. This is an actor to watch.
Peter Johnson gives a finely tuned and nuanced performance as Jack Smythe, grounding the play in American pragmatism, while never hiding Jack's self-doubt. A former bum saved by Bridget after his wife's death, Jack harbors dreams of starting his own car rental business but knows he needs Bridget's steadiness to keep him from backsliding. With flashes of boyish charm, Johnson plays Jack as a man who has learned that survival requires both hope and realism. His romantic interest in Bridget emerges through gestures of care until her reluctance obliges him to spell it out.
The dynamic between Bridget and Cathleen provides the play's emotional spine. Noone explores the generational divide within the immigrant experience: the older woman’s wariness and hard-won cynicism versus the younger woman's naive enthusiasm and belief in reinvention. When Cathleen expresses love, Bridget flinches, unable to reciprocate with the ease her niece expects. Malejs and Crumley navigate this fraught relationship with palpable sensitivity, showing us how trauma can make even familial affection feel like an accusation.
The production's technical elements support the intimacy of this human drama. Matthew DiVita's lighting design subtly shifts to indicate the passage of that long August day, while Kenneth Shaw's costume and hair design anchors the characters in their class and era.
It's worth noting that O'Neill himself wrote a one-act called "Thirst" about three characters on a lifeboat, a coincidence of titles that suggests Noone's characters are similarly adrift, clinging to whatever might keep them afloat in an indifferent sea, underscoring how the immigrant experience is itself a kind of shipwreck.
The production effectively uses voice-over actors (Todd Benzin, Kate LoConti Alcocer, David Lundy, and RJ Voltz) to represent the Tyrone family in the adjacent rooms. We hear fragments of O'Neill's dialogue filtering through the walls, and the kitchen's occupants, physically present but socially invisible, must navigate around and through these eruptions of genteel misery.
Despite the weight of its themes, Thirst is imbued with lively comedy. The banter between the three servants – when Bridget is in her cups, when Cathleen tries to "loosen up" her aunt, when they take turns imitating the members of the household -- provides moments of genuine levity that make the more deeply emotional scenes hit harder.
In his playwright's note, Noone writes of wanting to "bring to life a world that has long since passed, but is deeply connected to who we are today." In an era of renewed debate about immigration, borders, and belonging, Thirst offers a reminder of the human cost and human courage involved in every decision to seek a better life elsewhere.
LoConti Alcocer's direction never forces these connections; she trusts the play and her actors to make the case through accumulation of detail rather than through underlining. The production feels intimate without feeling small, specific without feeling parochial. It's a pleasure to watch these actors inhabit this world, and Irish Classical Theatre has given the play the production it deserves. This is handsome, heartfelt work, theater crafted with evident care and considerable skill.
"Thirst" by Ronán Noone continues at the Irish Classical Theatre Company through November 23, 2025. For tickets and information, visit irishclassicaltheatre.com.