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"I know it's ridiculous," Sinéad Cusack says; she has to cut our interview a bit short so she can prepare for her performance. "It's pathetic, but it's something I need for the part. I like having a cup of tea, getting used to being in the theater, hearing the gossip. Then I do make-up for about a half-hour. And I do an entire speed-run of the play every night. I believe she should be exhausted before she starts."

The "she" to whom Cusack refers is Mai, the focal figure in Sebastian Barry's Our Lady of Sligo, now at the Irish Repertory Theatre. Mai is an alcoholic dying of cancer, and she happens to have a very noticeable gift of Irish gab. The moment the lights go up, Cusack as Mai sits bolt upright to talk about her marriage, her children, her father, etc., speaking Barry's poetic but lacerating prose virtually non-stop for the next two hours. This cascade of words--possibly the equal of Hamlet's discourses--is what Cusack speeds through before the audience files in.

Cusack plays Mai with a mastery matched by few actresses this season. (She received a Drama Desk Award nomination for her performance, but the honor went to Eileen Heckart.) As Mai remembers and even relives her difficult life, myriad emotions play across Cusack's roundish face and vibrate through her body as ripples and shadows across the surface of a pond. She's called on to harass, to insult, to cajole, to placate. At no time does the actress miss a note in this complex emotional fugue.

For our interview, however, nothing of the wasted, worried Mai is present in Cusack's demeanor. In a small seating-area adjacent to the Irish Rep's auditorium, Cusack relaxes into a love seat. She's wearing a blazer and trousers, the sort of outfit a well-heeled woman might choose for wandering through Lord & Taylor or Bloomingdale's. She's amiable and easily amused, but she is also quick in her responses.

The first thing she tells me is that playing the deeply depressed Mai doesn't bring her down at all. And Cusack has played the part many times: at London's National Theater, on a tour of England, and now--after a year away from the part--again in Manhattan. "I have the huge satisfaction of exploring another layer of this extraordinary woman," she says. "It's a constant fact-finding mission. I discover something new every night almost, because the play is so complex and deep, so heavy with words and images. You don't come to the bottom of it easily."

Having spent so much time with Mai, Cusack says of her performance: "It is much, much better than it was. It's more multi-faceted. I never felt much strain, except in the early weeks, remembering all those words. 'Punishing' is the only way to describe it--but I became more confident about the words themselves. That's what the year's gap and coming to America has done. I hadn't done the play in over a year, and although I wasn't thinking about Mai a lot [during the break], she was there in the back of my head. The work I'd done on her was marinating, or cooking, or something."

As she reflects on the character's development, Cusack is intrigued with the actor's process she's followed. Since Mai addresses the audience frequently, Cusack has had to reconsider her relationship with those on the other side of the fourth wall. "I do find the collaboration with the audience fascinating in that no two nights are the same--never," she says. "You know within two minutes of walking on that stage what you're dealing with. It's some sort of magical transference; I've never used or needed an audience the way I need them in this play. I need their faces, their responses, their enthusiasm, their enjoyment."

Cusack admits that most of the characters she's played are still with her, an experience common to fine actors. "They're there," she says, smiling matter-of-factly. "They're part of our circle of friends. We probably know them better than we know many of our friends, because we've had to do so much exploration of their lives. We're all sponge-like in our ability to absorb. But there are some characters that remain stronger than others--like the Scottish queen, whose name we won't mention in the theater." (In refusing to say the words "Lady Macbeth," Cusack hews to the theatrical tradition that to speak the title of Shakespeare's tragedy will invoke a curse.)