The last time we saw Deirdre O'Connell on stage, playing a bisexual college professor named Margie in Sarah Schulman's Manic Flight Reaction, she was alone in her ramshackle Midwestern living room, trying to put her life back together. As Leslie Ayvazian's thought-provoking but dramatically unsatisfying Lovely Day begins in the Play Company production at the Beckett Theatre, O'Connell is alone in another living room -- a far more tasteful one, traditionally designed by David Korins -- busily rearranging the furniture. Her character, Fran, seems drastically different from Margie on the surface, but they're not as far apart as one might imagine.

We soon learn that Fran indulges in redecoratio[...]