It is a chilly Irish seaside town, he loves her, and   she loves him but he drives her away with his chilly intellectual life view and marries a more compliant version of her, and she marries a more life loving but less intelligent version of him. Forty years later he is told he only has a few months to live and tries to mend and make sense of the life he chose.

The casting of “A life” is absolutely perfect with John Mahoney turning in another razor sharp portrayal of an Irish mind fraught with both pride and regret in the character Desmond Drumm.  Linda Kimbrough plays Mary, the woman he should have married and allowed to conquer his fears with a feisty, uncompromising intelligence.

The entire cast was wonderful. I was especially impressed with the “young Mary” and Desmond portrayed by Matt Schwader and Melanie Keller. They not only looked like a young Mahoney and Kimbrough, you really got the sense, as is crucial to the play that you were indeed actually watching a flashback from their lives forty years prior.

My only suggestion is to slow down the pace of the first act. The rapid fire pace is hard to keep up with and took away a little bit of the sense that one is eavesdropping on a small town rap session that I so enjoyed later on in the show.

As always, John Mahoney’s work is a pleasure to watch and anchors the show with a gritty realism that only he can deliver.

"A Life" is playing at Northlight Theatre through April 25th. For more information, visit www.northlight.org.