Celtic knot Ballast ties together two kinds of troubles BY CAROLYN CLAY
	Ballast By Kathleen Rogers. Directed by Nora Hussey. Set by Ken Loewit. Costumes by Katherine Hall. Lighting by Whitney L. White. Sound by Rick Brenner. Choreography by Katie Griswold. With Alicia Kahn, Natalie Rose, and Derry Woodhouse. Presented by Centastage and Wellesley Summer Theatre Company at the Boston Center for the Arts through October 2.

The press release for Ballast describes the disappearance of a child as "every parent’s worst nightmare." But in Kathleen Rogers’s new play, it’s really just a catalyst. Deirdre and Jack Fallon are an Irish couple we see meeting cute as they step smartly to an Irish tune at a wedding on home turf. Pretty quickly, in dramaturgical terms, the no-nonsense Deirdre has emigrated to America, and before long, the more sentimental Jack joins her, putting the Auld Sod behind him to become a successful contractor. When the Fallons’ 13-year-old daughter, Maeve, goes missing in Massachusetts, the event drives a wedge between the couple, with Deirdre determined to move forward through grief and Jack stubbornly clinging to hope while retreating into a crazy depression that puts him in the tragic grip of Irish history in general and the mid-19th-century Great Hunger in particular. The ghost of the daughter, still perky, watches unseen over the parents, and eventually another, grittier phantom steps out of Maeve’s recent social-studies project to lure Jack back into brute history. There are two potentially gripping but insufficiently married dramas here. Alice Sebold didn’t wind up a long-time resident of the bestseller lists by muddying up The Lovely Bones with the potato famine.

For her part, Boston-based playwright Rogers is more interested in the effects of Irish history on the Irish-American psyche than she is in the specific horror that befalls Maeve or her parents, who are robbed not only of their daughter but of any resolution. The kidnap drama is portrayed in Ballast sketchily, even a little cutely, with the snatched child relegated to a side-stage basement, where she taunts a less-than-menacing abductor called the Monkey Mask Man before wafting to the Other Side. Left behind, Deirdre and Jack are at each other’s throats from the get-go, so that the disintegration of a relationship that sometimes comes with shared trauma isn’t much of a drama either. Instead, Rogers concentrates on various manifestations of Irish-American identity, with Deirdre determined to continue the journey away from her roots and Jack taking to sleeping in the basement on the wooden ship’s berth he and Maeve built for that school project about Lizzie Moore, a young woman who escaped the famine by coming to America as ballast on an empty trade ship. Having delivered their wares to Europe, these vessels used the human weight to keep them upright on the return journey.

Ballast began life as a 10-minute two-character play presented by Wellesley Summer Theatre Company as part of the 2003 Boston Theater Marathon. Having lost their child, Deirdre and Jack clashed, she resolved to persevere, he sinking into cultural history and refusing to be thrown a buoy. The little drama deserved expansion, and Rogers undertook to develop it. Yet it’s in the addition of literal characters to stand in for the earlier work’s metaphor that the play falters. Maeve is too stereotypically, all-Americanly precious — especially as played in this Centastage/WSTC production by an exaggeratedly gangly and enthused adult actor, Alicia Kahn. (She’s nonetheless endearing, rehearsing in baggy dress over school uniform her social-studies-project performance as young Lizzie, who speed-relates the story of the famine and her subsequent shipboard passage.) Kahn is more convincing as the dirty, tougher ghost of Lizzie, who entices the disintegrating Jack into a painful re-enactment of the horrors of the famine by promising to take him through this crucible to his daughter.

Rogers’s play is heartfelt and well written, establishing background with just a few strokes. And it’s well served by the collaborative production, which is simply directed by Nora Hussey on a set by Ken Loewit that suggests the hold of a ship as well as bare-bones locales in the Fallons’ home. At the center of the design — or the bottom of the boat — is an elaborate Celtic circle that connotes connection through generations. Wisps of mournful Irish song and cryptic nursery rhyme are woven throughout. As Deirdre, the excellent Natalie Rose gives a contained yet anguished performance. Derry Woodhouse too does a wrenching turn as the history-haunted Jack, though in this expanded version of the play, the character is in extremis for too long with nowhere to go. Eventually, tearful bombast threatens to give the heave-ho to emotional ballast.