NEW YORK MAGAZINE

THE STAGE DIVE WEEKEND RECOMMENDATION: TEMPORAL POWERS

SCOTT BROWN

September 2, 2011

After the first act of Teresa Deevy’s obscure 1932 Irish drama Temporal Powers, we think we’ve got it pegged: A couple (Aidan Redmond and Rosie Benton) struggling mightily with poverty and each other find a sack of cash wedged in the eave of the ruined hovel they’re living in, having been evicted the day before. She wants to keep it; he wants to turn it over to the church. We seem to be in Simple Plan territory, a moral bear trap set to spring. But anyone lucky enough to have caught the Mint’s last Deevy play — last year’s Wife to James Whelan — knows that this long-lost playwright doesn’t do “simple.” What unfolds in acts two and three is a rich and richly troubling portrait of a marriage, and a community, struggling in the vast, disaster-pocked no-man’s-land between comforting moral absolutes and total exigency. Whiskey is served at the act breaks. You’ll need it, in the best way.