Theater Review: CORKTOWN ’39 (Rogue Machine at The Matrix)

IN CORKTOWN ’39, THE LIVING ARE
JUST GHOSTS WITH BETTER TIMING

Mark Mendelson‘s tightly composed set at The Matrix Theatre is a room cloaked in aging wealth at the Keating family’s Philadelphia home. Heavy curtains. Soft chairs. Whiskey always within reach. It feels like it once held power and still holds its consequences. That atmosphere is no accident—it’s a haunt of choices made long ago and still echoing. John Fazakerley‘s moody companion to Corktown ’57,  Corktown ’39—now being presented by Rogue Machine—draws on a little-remembered 1939 plot to assassinate King George VI, but Fazakerley isn’t chasing headlines. He is after what festers when loyalty outlives clarity. This is not a play about action. It’s about inertia that pretends to be purpose.

Ann Noble, JD Cullum

Fazakerley’s writing channels Eugene O’Neill, plumbing the depths of bruised legacy, unresolved tensions, and the crushing weight of family history. But while O’Neill’s characters often succumb to despair, Fazakerley’s protagonists are more calculating, using ideology as a tool to manipulate and maneuver. Beneath the surface of emotional wreckage, a complex political dynamic is at play—a subtle engine of ambition and conviction that propels the characters forward, even as they’re mired in paralysis.

Jeff Lorch, Ron Bottitta, JD Cullum

At the center is Martin Connor, played by Jeff Lorch, an IRA sniper recently returned from the Spanish Civil War. He carries a mission and a past that trails him like a second shadow. Lorch gives him weight without leaning into performance. Still. Watchful. Quiet in a way that unnerves. Regret slips out like a splinter beneath the skin. You don’t see the moment it pierces through. He’s already crossed a moral line the others are still romanticizing from a safe distance.

Connor might carry the mission, but it’s in the Keating family where the ideological rot hits closest to home. The real tension plays out between Mike Keating and his daughter, Kate. Ron Bottitta‘s Mike operates like an aging strategist, a former IRA operative now orchestrating backroom fundraising in America. Cynical and exacting, he speaks the language of hidden deals. Ann Noble‘s Kate mirrors him and dismantles him. Once an intelligence operative in Ireland who turned seduction into strategy, she returns home with the precision of someone who measures every word. Noble never raises her voice, yet the air sharpens when she speaks. In a city filled with remarkable stage talent, her ability to merge control with emotional gravity places her in rare company.

Ann Noble

Aside from a few Irish accents that wander into brogue caricature, the cast performs with fierce restraint. There are no theatrics. Just erosion. Line by line, moment by moment, each exchange carries memory as a weapon. Loyalty functions as leverage. Betrayal is inevitable, almost procedural. The strain between Mike and his children over a cause that has already taken too much creates an undertow of bitterness. Fazakerley never passes judgment. He simply lets the damage pile up.

Much of that damage is delivered through the dialogue. Characters speak in jagged phrases, interruptions woven with old tensions and unspoken debts. The silences stretch just enough to hurt. There is rhythm, but it never feels composed. It feels lived. Urban. Abrasive. Sometimes lyrical without warning. The script understands that people talk in code, that speech can be a form of misdirection, that what isn’t said can strike harder than what is.

Ron Bottitta, Jeff Lorch

Martin and Kate’s romantic connection offers a fragile reprieve. Their bond feels urgent, but not impulsive. It is built on recognition, not romance. Two people who understand the weight of belief and see in each other a faint outline of what life could look like without it. The play’s central tension lives there. Not in whether the mission succeeds, but in whether either of them can imagine themselves outside its gravity.

Thomas Vincent Kelly, JD Cullum, Ann Noble, Ron Bottitta

Around these intimate battles, real historical figures orbit, thickening the play’s ideological gravity. Joe McGarrity (Peter Van Norden) bankrolls the American end of the nationalist dream. He was a Philadelphia businessman whose fortune flowed into IRA coffers with unwavering zeal. Then there’s Seán Russell (JD Cullum), the IRA Chief of Staff whose wartime path veered into grim territory. In pursuit of Irish independence, he looked to Nazi Germany not with naivety, but with cold-eyed intent. Tommy McCabe‘s fictional Frank Keating, Kate’s brother, lingers at the edge of the room, unsure if the family’s legacy is one he wants or just one he inherited. These characters create a political web thick with contradiction.

Tommy McCabe, Ann Noble, Ron Bottitta

This is where Corktown ’39 stops being a period piece and becomes a diagnosis. Set against the backdrop of 1939, when Europe teetered on the precipice of catastrophe, the play quietly draws parallels to our own present. These characters navigate a world where ideological certainty offers false comfort while democratic institutions falter. The historical setting isn’t distant context—it’s a mirror reflecting our own political tribalism, showing how easily the boundaries between resistance and extremism blur when desperation takes hold.

Jeff Lorch, Thomas Vincent Kelly, Ann Noble, Tommy McCabe

Steven Robman‘s direction thrives within four walls. The Keating home becomes a pressure chamber. Dan Weingarten’s lighting design subtly amplifies the play’s emotional claustrophobia, using shadow and restraint to mirror the characters’ entrapment in fading convictions. There is nowhere to hide, and that claustrophobia becomes part of the language. But when the play ventures outside, it stumbles. A political fundraiser scene tries to expand to another location but loses the taut energy that sustains everything else. When Cullum’s Russell addresses a crowd that isn’t there, the realism temporarily dissipates.

That sense of uncomfortable familiarity lingers. The historical frame may be yellowed with age, but the ruins of belief remain intact. The ideology that once drove these characters now lives inside their relationships. In a time when conviction is used to redraw boundaries, Fazakerley’s ghosts feel uncomfortably close—they feel like us.

Thomas Vincent Kelly, JD Cullum

For anyone who believes theater should do more than entertain or reassure, Corktown ’39 offers something essential. It refuses the comfort of historical distance. It denies us the luxury of judgment without implication. Instead, it asks us to sit with uncomfortable recognition—that the forces that possessed these characters haven’t vanished but evolved, that the damage ideology inflicts on intimacy hasn’t healed but metastasized. In an age when political identity increasingly determines personal relationships, Fazakerley’s examination of belief’s wreckage isn’t just relevant. It’s urgent. This isn’t theater that sends you home with answers. It’s theater that follows you home, dragging the unresolved behind it.

photos by Jacques Lorch

Corktown ’39
Rogue Machine Theatre
Matrix Theatre, 7657 Melrose Avenue
Fri, Sat, and Mon at 8 (dark May 12); Sun at 3
1 hour 45 minutes, no intermission
ends on May 25, 2025
for tickets ($15-$60), call 855.585.5185 visit Rogue Machine

for more shows, visit Theatre in LA