Interview: Orange Is the New Black’s Kate Mulgrew Talks About Playing an Artist With a Shadowy Past at Irish Rep

Over the course of a distinguished career, Kate Mulgrew has portrayed people as diverse as Katharine Hepburn and Star Trek’s Kathryn Janeway, and she has appeared in plays by writers ranging from Charles Busch to Charles L. Mee. Now she’s leading the cast of Nancy Harris’s intriguing new work, The Beacon, at Irish Repertory Theatre.

Mulgrew plays Beiv Scanlon, a noted Irish artist residing in an island college off the coast of West Cork. Her life gets complicated when she receives a rare visit from her son, Colm (Zach Appelman), and his young American wife (Ayana Workman). The relationship between parent and child is icy at best, in part because Colm — along with a bevy of true-crime junkies — wonders if Beiv is responsible for the death of his father, her ex-husband. Is there a beacon of hope for reconciliation?

Mulgrew took the role because she felt she could, “ground myself in this part and liberate myself within the play.” A couple of days before previews began, she talked to TheaterMania about art, motherhood, and spending time in Ireland.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

How is the play going?

Rehearsals have gone very well. I think in this case it has so much to do with the director, Marc Atkinson Borrull, who is a very gifted 34-year-old guy. His understanding of the text is almost preternaturally deep, and his energy springs from a place of passion. I’m surrounded by a cast that’s young, impressive, and highly motivated. Also, Nancy Harris has written a very dark, oddly, occasionally grotesquely funny play about human relationships in Ireland.

Beiv is an artist and a mother and has achieved a level of infamy because of the mystery surrounding her husband’s death. She’s holding on to some secrets, but she’s also renovating her house and putting in glass walls to open it up and not hide. What is it about her that you connect to?

That’s exactly right. What is this attempt to reveal herself? I’ve lived a very long life and I think there are many similarities between Beiv and myself. So the question becomes, do I have the courage, the wherewithal, to pull it out and splatter it? She’s suffering, but she has learned how to discipline her suffering to the point of steely eccentricity, which is wonderful to play. I’ve raised three children and I’ve had my knocks as an actress and as a writer, my struggles as an artist, and I am not without my own very dark secrets, so all of it comes into play.

Do we see you create any artwork onstage?

I do a charcoal sketch of a skull during the entirety of one scene. It’s on a flat table, but you’ll be able to understand it. It’s an exercise more than anything else. She must work every day or she feels that she cannot live with herself. It must be done in order to survive. That I would say is at the core of Beiv’s being.

Your mother was an artist, right?

My mother, my son is now a celebrated artist, my niece Therese is also quite well known. I come from a family of artists. Nobody else is an actor. I grew up in this strange environment where my mother, who had had eight children, would disappear into her studio, and it was as if it was a steel vault. You couldn’t go in, nor did you want to go in. It was something that belonged to her alone and had to do with her salvation. That much we recognized as children. So I grew up with a deference for artists and art, but also a sort of healthy fear and appreciation, I suppose, of the isolation that is necessary in order to paint well. It’s funny you should bring this up now because I’ve been missing her terribly. I wonder if that has to do with this play.

What is your take on Beiv as a mother?

She was a ferociously selfish mother by her own admission. But she also wants something for her son that most mothers cannot claim to truly want. She wants him to be free of all the guilt and shame and strange familial attachments that can drag us down and drown us. She wants to release him. Most mothers really want to cling to their children.

When did you live in Ireland?

I did a series called Orange Is the New Black and we worked for six months and then had a hiatus for six months. For about five years I spent those six months at a beautiful house on the shores of Lough Corrib, one of the most magnificent lakes in the west of Ireland, in a manor house which was loaned to me by a very generous friend. I wrote my second book there. And in those dark winter months, which were so hard for me, missing everybody, I’d light the fires. I’d really have to struggle with my emotions, then get to the work. And the work would come.

I felt that I was free there. Those were five of the happiest years of my life in that isolation because it was also full of beauty. The sun would come out for a minute, I’d grab my hat and I’d run out and I’d run into a neighbor and she’d have me in for a cuppa. And there’s nothing like the light in Ireland, so that informed the writing as well and how I felt.

Is this your first time working with Irish Rep?

It is. I find that surprising. I think the world of Ciarán O’Reilly. I went to see my friend, the great actor Reed Birney, in a play there with his son, Ephraim, and it was very good. We went out for drinks afterward and he said, “If you ever want to work, the Irish Rep is the place to go. They just love actors, and you feel it in your bones.” And they do. It’s like going home, a little bit. [The theater is] very small and funky and old. It has the feeling of a house, and I think the dynamic will be enhanced because of the intimacy.