“In this particular show, Terminus, it’s an extremely dark comedy,” Chuck Helm, director of performing arts for the Wexner Center, told WOSU theatre critic Joy Reilly. “It’s very inventive in it’s form, but the whole show is in rhyme. It’s not like Elizabethan rhyme, it’s very sort of, street language.”

Mark O’Rowe, a young Irish playwright, wrote and directed the play Terminus, which was first performed by Abbey Theatre, the National Theatre of Ireland, in 2007.

Helm said O’Rowe has used this idea of love of language in his other plays, such as Howie the Rookie, and that it really complements the plot, especially in Terminus.

“But [there’s] this kind of ornateness to it, which kind of heightened the whole phantasmic oracle scenario that he’s painting with this show,” Helm said.

The show is simply staged, Helm said, with only three actors whose interwoven monologues don’t directly interact with each other.

“The set is pretty dark,” Helm said. “There are these shards of broken mirrors that hover over their heads.”

Helm said the mirrors somewhat symbolize Ireland’s current fractured state of society.

“This idea of sort of a society that’s losing touch with its roots, that’s having its struggles trying to find its way in the world,” Helm said.

Some aspects of the show will certainly give audience members a jolt, Helm said, but other aspects are extremely funny.

“That’s one thing about how it reflects contemporary Ireland,” Helm said. “That kind of wit that’s always been a part of Irish consciousness, at the same time with this very kind of dark, strange twist.”

Terminus will be playing at OSU’s Thurber Theatre at the Drake Center on Wednesday, March 9 at 8 p.m.

Read More:

• Wexner Center for the Arts: Performing Arts- Terminus (The Wex)
• For Him the Devil is in Rhymes (NYT)