TINY HARVEST
Or maybe a good 12-step program would be more appropriate: Tiny Harvest’s family, the O’Reillys, are Irish. And we all know what that means–lots of liquor and talk (not to be confused with communication) and lots and lots of barely concealed hysteria about issues undealt with and feelings unexpressed. (I’m speaking here as a recovering Irish Catholic.) Playwright Greg Nagan has done a great job of laying the emotional foundation for his play. He clearly understands the underlying pressures in his contemporary middle-class Irish Catholic family–the disaffection with the church, the alienation from one’s own feelings, the scary economic climate that sends some scaling upward and others within the same family down, down, down.
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The rest of the cast don’t have a clue how to deliver Nagan’s often blunt and obvious dialogue in a way that will make him seem clever. To be fair, this shouldn’t really be their job. But unfortunately a production based on a weak play is like a dysfunctional family: hapless innocents are the ones who suffer the most.
