'Woman and Scarecrow': The Hollow Thud of a Kicked Bucket

Des Kennedy, a young Northern Irish director who two years ago turned the riveting Belfast drama "Scenes From the Big Picture" into a local hit, has returned to Washington to try to do the same for "Woman and Scarecrow," the tale of a dying woman and the apparition who can't get enough of her.

This time, he's got a heavier lift.

Marina Carr's play, receiving its U.S. premiere courtesy of Washington's Irish-centric theater company, Solas Nua, is a sort of valentine to death-obsession. Set in the ethereal bedroom of a character named Woman (Jennifer Mendenhall), who is wasting away from a terminal malady, the work traces both the natural and supernatural torments of a life cut short.

The combination of Kennedy and the eternally watchable Mendenhall could well have set the stage alight. The talents of actors' actors such as Nanna Ingvarsson and Brian Hemmingsen are tantamount to guaranteeing dramatic ignition. But the playwright's self-consciously lyrical prose -- though at times agreeably droll -- ultimately contributes to the sense of tedium that creeps up on a theatergoer, on what feels like an evening on a tape loop.

The surroundings are becoming: Set designer Lynly Saunders makes efficient use of the tiny Mead Theatre Lab at Flashpoint on G Street NW. The white room is dominated by a bed covered in white linen in which Mendenhall's Woman reclines, and hallucinates. Her delusions concern a being called Scarecrow, who as embodied by Ingvarsson serves both as the woman's guardian angel and something much less benevolent.

As it turns out, the mortal characters in the woman's orbit -- her philandering husband (Hemmingsen) and tiresomely pious aunt (an appealingly cartoonish Rena Cherry Brown) -- are not nearly as reliable company as Scarecrow. Carr, however, is more accomplished at setting narrative wheels in motion than in knowing where to steer them, so this portrait of a woman's last-gasp fears, regrets, grievances and anxieties can't seem to see its way clear of a general grimness.

Mendenhall, Ingvarsson and Hemmingsen supply the necessary intensity, even if "Woman and Scarecrow" is never as profound -- or as spooky -- as it strives to be.

Woman and Scarecrow, by Marina Carr. Directed by Des Kennedy. Set and costumes, Lynly Saunders; lighting, Marianne Meadows; sound, David Crandall. About 2 hours 20 minutes. Through May 31 at the Mead Theatre Lab at Flashpoint, 916 G St. NW. Visit http://www.solasnua.org or call 800-494-8497.