Off-Broadway Review—Leo McGann’s “The Honey Trap” at the Irish Rep

The Honey Trap

Written by Leo McGann

Directed by Matt Torney

Performances through November 23, 2025

Irish Repertory Theatre, 132 West 22nd Street, NY

Irishrep.org

Mathis and Hayden in The Honey Trap (photo: Carol Rosegg)

It’s rare that we see such a taut play as Leo McGann’s The Honey Trap, made even more unnervingly claustrophobic on the Irish Rep’s small stage. What begins as a memory play about Dave, a former British army corporal whose friend Bobby was killed in cloudy circumstances while both men were stationed in Northern Ireland in 1979, morphs bluntly but inevitably into a cat-and-mouse game between Dave and one of the women last seen with Bobby before his murder.

McGann shrewdly sets up The Honey Trap as a procedural of sorts: 45 years on, young American researcher Emily asks Dave questions about what happened in Belfast. Dave is initially put off because he feels that the right side (the British) has been largely ignored as Emily has spoken to mostly local witnesses. But her questions trigger his memories, which McGann reveals in illuminating flashbacks to Dave and Bobby at a local pub flirting with seemingly interested local lasses Kirsty and Lisa. But when Dave decides to leave the pub early after speaking to his wife on the phone, he convinces Bobby to stay with the women—with horrific results.

That Dave has been living with the guilt of abandoning Bobby is made manifest by his present-day behavior; he quickly snaps at and makes untoward comments about Emily, and—in the most unlikely moment in the play, but McGann needs it to happen so he can get to the second act—hires someone to ransack Emily’s hotel room to get copies of her taped interviews, from which he discovers the identities of the women from the pub. 

Dave finds out that they both went to America, where Kirsty died. But he tracks Lisa down to a café she owns and runs in Dublin, now as Sonia. Although Dave almost too easily gains her confidence, trust and willingness to go to dinner and bed with him after their first date, once they face off as mortal adversaries, McGann writes a breathless and insightful scene of memory, sorrow, forgiveness and revenge, complicating these mentally and morally exhausted individuals.

Matt Torney’s persuasive direction subtly allows the past to bleed into the present and vice versa, by way of Charlie Corcoran’s realistically mobile set, Michael Gottlieb’s authoritative lighting and James Garver’s appropriately chaotic sound design. Molly Ranson (Emily), Daniel Marconi (Young Dave), Harrison Tipping (Bobby), Doireann Mac Mahon (Kirsty) and Annabelle Zasowski (Lisa) are all quite good, while Michael Hayden, as Dave, is properly intense, exasperated or ironical as the situation requires.

But it’s Samantha Mathis, as Sonia—who was an IRA member when barely an adult and is now a soon-to-be grandmother and small business owner, living a dull working-class existence—who gives the play’s most exquisitely moving performance. Mathis owns the second act as soon as he enters, trading flirty barbs with Dave, who comes to her café posing as a dad dropping off his daughter at university. Mathis fully embodies the middle-aged divorcee who has lived a quiet life since she was in the IRA and is now desperate for any kind of excitement. The superbly staged, written and acted stand-off between Sonia and Dave is as riveting as anything I’ve seen in a theater in awhile.