The New Yorker

The Suitcase Under the Bed

August 25, 2017

Since 2010, the Mint, led by Jonathan Bank, the company’s artistic director, has presented three odd and fascinating full-length plays by Teresa Deevy, a deaf Irish writer who had a brief but fruitful collaboration with Dublin’s Abbey Theatre in the nineteen-thirties. This is an evening of four short plays (three of them never before produced), retrieved, as the umbrella title describes, from a spare room in Deevy’s home, in Waterford. During the course of these brief but loaded works, enacted by a lovely ensemble of seven under Bank’s direction, Deevy casts her eye on all strata of society. Love unexpected, unachieved, lost, or bargained for is at the core of these sketches, but always with a mysterious, not so wry twist that reveals something deep in the Irish, and the human, character.