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Banshee

Reviewed by Bill Raden

Theatre of NOTE

Through Nov. 1

The bonds of family, as any family member will attest, are simultaneously both blessing and curse. When the bondage is in balance, the result is what psychologists call a well-adjusted personality.

However, when the scales are tipped by rigid Catholic repression, old-world superstition, castrating maternal manipulation and a touch of organic mental disease, you get something not unlike Banshee, Brian C. Petti’s uneasy if earnest, 2011 overlay of Oedipal drama and eerie Irish folklore.

The time is 1981, when Manhattan’s west side still boasts the remnants of an Irish working class and where 40-year-old Jerry Sullivan (a heartfelt Bill Voorhees) recuperates in the cramped walk-up of his widowed, Éire-immigrant mother Kit (Lynn Odell), following a severe nervous breakdown.

But signs that Jerry’s complete recovery is in doubt abound, both in his wrenching nightmares of a mysterious woman attempting to coax him out of a paralytic catatonia, and in his susceptibility to Kit’s malicious mix of guilt-inducing disapproval and possessive wiles.

That toxicity turns critical when Jerry’s salt-of-the-earth cop brother (the fine Joe Mahon) sets him up with Cork-born Cara (Alysha Brady), who quickly becomes Jerry’s ego-boosting, too-good-to-be-true and unconditionally loving girlfriend. Soon, Kit is claiming a nocturnal warning by Jerry’s hallowed but deceased father that Cara is none other than a banshee, a soul-stealing ghoul from the old sod.

The question of whether the real banshee is Cara, Kit or a more pathological kind of entity inside Jerry himself is enlivened by strong performances from Odell, whose Una O’Connor-ish cartoon of a brogue-spouting harridan turns decidedly sinister in Act 2; and Brady, who hints at something more grotesque and unseemly beneath Cara’s brightly nurturing façade.

Thanks to a first-rate production (the emblematic symmetry of William Moore, Jr.’s cleverly ecclesiastic set; Cricket S. Meyers’ haunting sound; Matt Richter’s expertly etched lights), director James R. Carey’s compact staging manages to tame the more unwieldy of Petti’s movie-script scene changes while a sturdy ensemble helps to forgive the text’s occasional lapses into hoary cliché and the play’s abruptly too-literal, comic-book denouement.

Theatre of NOTE, 1517 N. Cahuenga Blvd., Hlywd.; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m.; through November 1. (323) 856-8611, theatreofnote.com.