Review: PICT’s One-Man Thriller ‘The Smuggler’ Features a Tour de Force by Michael Patrick Trimm

By Mingsi Ma

Michael Patrick Trimm claims the stage as the protagonist Tim Finnegan as soon as he tosses his keys onto the bar counter, his shirt sleeves rolled up under a black vest, and strides across the room. I find the first few seconds of The Smuggler to be smart, because they establish the character very quickly, before he even speaks.

The Smuggler, presented by Pittsburgh International Classic Theatre, is a one-man show featuring Trimm. Written by Ronán Noone, the play follows an Irish immigrant bartender as he recounts his experiences navigating the underbelly of immigration, caught in a moral quandary between survival and complicity. Trimm’s Tim Finnegan has a rugged look, coming across as uninhibited and giving off a pirate-like energy. It’s a fast-paced and energetic performance — Trimm won’t let you take your eyes off him for a second.

Michael Patrick Trimm as Tim Finnegan in The Smuggler. (Image: Max Mitchell)

By nature, a one-man show is full of interesting challenges. The Smuggler includes multiple small stories that eventually collide and intertwine. As Tim Finnegan retells these stories, he acts out the other characters involved, a total of 12 people besides himself. Tim has a strong Irish accent, while many of the other characters do not, and Trimm swiftly switches accents to signal the character shift.

Plays often use different colored spotlights to help actors distinguish between characters, but The Smuggler relies heavily on the actor alone. Trimm’s solid performance reflects his close attention to different characters’ physicality, tones, accents, and posture. From time to time, Trimm is an angry wife urging her husband to pull himself together, an agonized father who has just lost his son, a thuggish coyote smuggling immigrants, and more.

At the Sunday post-show talkback, Trimm expressed gratitude to The Smuggler’s director Melissa Hill Grande, for guiding him to clearly separate his performance of each character. It’s great fun to count how many characters appear throughout his performance.

The highlight of the play is no doubt Tim’s battle against a fierce rat in a basement. Trimm takes us on an exciting rollercoaster: His hands quickly slice through the air, his voice builds momentum, rising and falling, and his body leans forward. The lighting designed by Liam Grande flickers as the room tenses up. As the sneaky rat cuts through the dark, the rustling sound moves around the room. The sound design by Adam Davy synchronizes with Trimm’s performance. The well-coordinated sound and lighting design was giving me the same vibes as those fancy immersive 4DX movies.

Playwright Noone’s skill in crafting a comprehensive story, told in verse, is incredible. Early in The Smuggler, many of the smaller stories Tim recounts seem random and isolated. Yet slowly they converge into a cohesive narrative in a clever and seamless way. The seemingly stray anecdotes have foreshadowed what comes next. Noone works his magic by leading the audience with sparkles of light along a dark, mysterious tunnel, eventually guiding us to the prettiest crystalline cave. After a few AAH and AHA moments (yes, they deserve to be in all caps), one realizes how ingeniously the story has been constructed, and that genius revelation and plot twists are the beauty of this thrilling play.

At the end of the day, it’s a story on immigration. The word “immigrant” feels especially heavy in this play, as it does in daily life. It signals an otherness, a shackle that makes someone “different” as soon as one sets foot in this country. The Smuggler highlights immigrants’ vulnerability, whether in their legal status, fragile safety net, information barriers, or the limitations on health insurance and banking services. Tim’s stubbornness in “making it” also tells the immigrant story, as he has already endured so much that the perceived sunk cost feels too high to give up.

For those of you wanting to check out this performance, I highly recommend arriving early so you can grab one of those seats at the front round tables. As explained by PICT’s Artistic Director Elizabeth Elias Huffman, The Smuggler was originally planned to be staged at Riley’s Pour House in Carnegie, which was unfortunately destroyed by an intense fire in November 2024. I do lament that this idea never came to fruition. Even so, staged at Carnegie Stage, with a bar re-created for the show by Johnmichael Bohach, it still keeps the merit of feeling intimate, especially as Tim walks around and has light interaction with the audience. And don’t forget to listen carefully to every line — you’d be amazed how many rhymes there are, and how rhythmic it is.

TICKETS AND DETAILS

Pittsburgh International Classic Theater’s production of The Smuggler is on stage through March 22, 2026, at Carnegie Stage, 25 W. Main St., Carnegie, PA. Learn more at https://www.picttheatre.org/

Michael Patrick Trimm as Tim Finnegan in The Smuggler. (Image: Max Mitchell)