'For Love' Breeds a Dark, Blue Romantic Comedy

After recent excursions into Americana with the radio play of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” rural nostalgia with “Donnybrook!” and 20th-century institutional repression with “Airswimming,” the Irish Repertory Theater switches into high contemporary gear with “For Love,” a riotously tart and fiercely energetic production that opened on Tuesday. Billed as a “dark blue romantic comedy,” the play — a dramedy, really, only fleetingly romantic — plunges straight into Ireland’s fraught urban present.  

Consider the opening scene: A couple drunkenly stagger into an apartment — the woman clinging to a drink — and collapse on the floor, intent on sloppy, impassioned lovemaking. But the fellow blacks out, and the woman loudly curses, enraged at her unconscious date. Then she passes out. And there you have it: “For Love,” a portrait of women in their mid-30s struggling in recession-ravaged Dublin, might be called “Bad Sex and the City.” But that would be reductive. It is much, much more. 

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