‘Approach’ delicate exploration of deception
Almost no physical activity happens during the 80-minute running time of “The Approach,” Irish playwright Mark O’rowe’s gently powerful drama about three women in contemporary Dublin. Over the course of multiple one-on-one conversations in the small Bernstein Theatre at Shakespeare & Company, the pairs talk at an outside cafe table, never leaving their chairs except for an embrace. Otherwise they sit, moored in place by the power of shared memory and by the lies they tell, to each other and to themselves.
Such stillness, with clues given by glances and what’s left unsaid beneath their reminiscences, sets a formidable challenge to sustain audience interest, one that is effectively met by the cast — Nicole Ansari, Elizabeth Aspenlieder and Michelle Joyner —and co-directors Mark Farrell and Tina Packer. As rich as this production is in multiple moments of profundity within seemingly simple exchanges, “The Approach,” by its end, proves easier to appreciate and admire than to like, and such appreciation and admiration takes effort to unpack.
It would be a terrible play to see alone. Bring at least one companion, preferably more, the better to examine what you’ve seen from multiple perspectives on the drive home. While you still may not fully explore it with a group analysis, you’ll be more satisfied than by a solo mulling.
Anna (Joyner) and Denise (Aspenlieder) are sisters, but the first two conversations are with each of them and their mutual friend Cora (Ansari), the most mild-mannered of the three, who tries in gentle, subtle ways to balance her fondness for both sisters with independent allegiance to each. Friends in their youth who spent long, chatty nights together in college, they’re now in their 40s, and the sisters have been estranged for years after one started a relationship with a man just after he’d broken it off with the other
sister, or perhaps while they were still together.
The directors skillfully guide the cast as O’rowe builds the story with the deft deployment of details, clues casually scattered to be gathered and sorted. As you watch, questions mount: Why are these women so defined by the men in, and out of, their lives? Where is their agency in their own existence? Only one seems to have a job, and it’s so inconsequential that it’s never clearly defined. Why are they so stuck?
O’rowe is stingy enough with answers that, if you miss a single gesture during a conversation between the sisters, you won’t understand how their rapprochement was possible. The conversations circle, overlap and repeat, with the truth rarely obvious and never simple. Their lives becalmed, they sit at that table, an evocative streetscape by designer Jim Youngerman on a backdrop behind them suggesting a city they’re in but not especially a part of, and they talk and talk, until the tolling of a church bell signals it’s time to go.