NEW YORK—With dissonant music filling the theater prior to the start of the performance, John McDermott’s set featuring a strip of barbed wire, and Jeff Larson’s painfully true projections of war, one knows one is about to witness something tense and serious.
The belle in the title refers to 17-year-old Anne Malloy (Kate Lydic), the major character in Nate Rufus Edelman’s stirring play “The Belle of Belfast.”
Anne is noted by the young men in her neighborhood as being very generous, perhaps overly generous, with her attentions. And why not?
It is 1985, Belfast. And Anne has suffered a terrible personal loss wrought by the devastation known as The Troubles. Her parents have been killed by a thoughtless act, a bombing in a small street where the older couple had been innocently shopping.
