LADY G (excerpt) by Lady Gregory with additional materials by Ciaran O'Reilly

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LADY G Plays and Whisperings of Lady Gregory

By Lady Gregory With additional materials B Cia a O Rei

Irish Repertory Theatre 132 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011 February 14, 2020

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Cast of Characters ACT 1 Lad Gregor Una Clancy William Butler Yea s James Russell Mar Sheridan ..Terry Donnelly Balladeer Terr Donnell Sir William Gregor James Russell Wilfred Bl n John Keating Edward Mar n John Keating Anne Horniman Terr Donnell Mike McInerney .James Russell Michael Miskell ...........John Keating Honor Donohoe .Terry Donnelly Act 2 Widow Quinn Christy Actor A Actor B Ac or C John Quinn Marian GBS .

Sean O Case .

Hag 1 Hag 2 McDonough

Terry Donnelly James Russell Terry Donnelly James Russell John Kea ing John Keating Terry Donnelly John Keating John Keating Terry Donnelly Una Clancy John Keating

LADY G: We began our first foray into America in 1911. I took my first Atlantic voyage and arrived in Boston aboard the SS Cymric. The Playboy of the Western World was announced for October 16th, and two days before the United Irish Societies had pledged themselves to: ACTOR C: "Drive this vile thing from the stage."

ACTOR A: There was, however, very little opposition in the Plymouth Theatre in Boston. There was a little booing and hissing, but there were a great many Harvard boys among the audience who had free tickets, courtesy of Lady Gregory, and whenever there was a sign of coming disapproval, they cheered enough to drown it.

New York was a different story: After the curtain went up, the interruptions began. Stink bombs and rosary beads were thrown on the stage along with red peppers eggs and potatoes! The theatre managers had been saying: ACTOR B: 'These things don't happen in New York.'

ACTOR A: When this did happen, there were plenty of police, but they wouldn't arrest anyone because no one gave the order, and the disturbance was let go on nearly all through the first act.

LADY G: I went round when the disturbance began, and from backstage and knelt in the opening of the hearth: Keep going! Don’t stop for a moment but spare your voices. We will do the whole act over.

ACTOR A: "One man in a gesture of defiance threw his watch onto the stage. He had second thoughts about it and after the show went to the stage door and demanded it back. He was met by the doorman.

ACTOR B: Yeah, yeah These things don't happen in New York.'

LADY G: On the Sunday, I visited my friend, Theodore Roosevelt at his home in Oyster Bay and asked if he would come.

ROOSEVELT: I would really like to see it but Mrs. Roosevelt has not been feeling well and I’d rather not leave home.

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(The backwall has elements of the facade of the House at Coole Park. The front door of the house allows the exits and entrances from back stage. There are four coat trees in nooks around the stage with various costumes and props which the four actors will avail of as needed. At the front of the house is a representation of he a ograph ree For The Workhouse Ward, two decrepit cots are necessary to represent the Ward; For McDono gh s Wife two sugan chairs and perhaps a table. Maybe a fireplace if possible.

Lady Gregory is discovered at the Fireplace. There are three actors in neutral clothing sitting in chairs in nooks about the room.)

LADY G: Hello. I’m Lady Isabella Augusta Gregory. Or at least that’s the role I’m playing tonight. Lady Gregory is gone now ---since 1932 my goodness, almost 90 years so we’re just bringing her back this evening for a visit…

Through me.

(Lady G takes center stage.)

And here I am.

Things have changed a bit since I was around. Ireland has changed. The world has...

My friend, William Butler Yeats, or Willie as I always called him –though he never called me Augusta --always the formal Lady Gregory. Perhaps it was his way of keeping a romantic distance between us. Well I’m sure that was not necessary, but if it was his goal, he succeeded. We remained friends.

He was often fond of rousing spirits from their final resting place and bringing them back. I spent one perfectly dreadful evening with him around Ouija board. I don’t think he would object now if we brought him back for a brief visit.

I will be asking one of my colleagues here to represent him. (An Actor steps forward and dons a pair of spectacles a la Yeats) Thank you, James.

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Of course, I would like, as you say, in modern parlance, to control the narrative –I didn’t always get to do that when we were fighting the fight but I was never one to dwell on that. I just got on with it, didn’t I, Willie?

YEATS: You did Lady Gregory. Always.

LADY G: We had a great deal of fun, didn’t we? We did some fine things. Our little plays….

YEATS: We set the world on fire…

LADY G: We did. My plays have not been performed much since my departure so one of the conditions of my contract at the Irish Repertory Theatre was that if I was to make an appearance, I would like to see some of them staged and maybe, maybe --if you twist my arm,-- I might be tempted to take a small role. I acted a tiny bit you know. I once played Cathleen in Cathleen Ni Hoolihan. (to Yeats) That play we wrote together. How was my acting Willie? You can be honest now.

YEATS: We wrote a fine play together. I wish I had been there to direct you…

LADY G: Ah I see… How delicate you can be… sometimes.

But before the sand in the hour glass runs out, I should tell you a little about myself. At the midnight hour between the fourteenth and fifteenth of March 1852, the planet Jupiter, so astrologers say, being in mid heaven, I was born in Roxborough in Connaught in the west of Ireland. I arrived on the Ides of March –a date the Romans considered a deadline to settle debts. Shakespeare warned us to beware the Ides of March. Nobody paid much attention in Galway.

I’m told my mother was disappointed to see me. She liked boys better even though there were already five boys in the household. I was her fifth girl and she had two other step-daughters. Years later, my nurse, Mary Sheridan, told me…

MARY: Do ya know that after you were born, they put you in a quilt and forgot all about ya? You almost never drew a second breath.

LADY G: My mother said she would have been sorry for such a loss because the boys were looking forward to playing with the new baby.

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MARY: Indeed.

LADY G: She had four boys after me – nine lads in all so I imagine she was finally satisfied. Don’t you think?

MARY: I suppose she was.

LADY G: The area was called Cregroostha, but my family, the Persses who came to Ireland in Cromwellian times., changed it to Roxborough.

It had 6000 acres of wide beauty and was a hive of activity with its stables full of horses, its kennels full of sporting dogs: Gordon setters, retrievers, greyhounds; the sawmill with its carpenters and engineers; the garden so well tilled –full of grapes and melons and peaches and apples, inexhaustible fruit.

I understand you have a film these days called Downton Abbey. Yes, it was like that. Of course, the house wasn’t so grand. I remember we had a lot of rats but all the country houses did then.

Years later when I was married and at Coole Park, we had a visitor from the city who saw a rat in her bedroom when she was undressing, a rat in her mattress when she got into bed and the next morning at breakfast she discovered one had sampled her slice of toast, She left the house and marched the three miles to the village of Gort and sent herself an urgent telegram, summoning her home.

But Roxborough was a magical place for a young girl. I could climb a short little limestone hillock and the level line of the Slieve Echtge moorlands were open and airy to the west and the wild Burren Hills queerly armored in their white limestone pavements allowed me catch a glimpse of the distant Atlantic. A brown trout stream flowed the entire three-mile length of the estate and emptied into Galway Bay. During the civil war the IRA burned our family house to the ground and the estate that my family had run for many generations was divided into one hundred and twenty smallholdings. The sand in the Persses’ hourglass had run out. It happened a lot then.

I was raised there without reading a book --except the bible-- until I attained the freedom of my eighteenth year. Then I bought the Complete Works of Shakespeare

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for a shilling and explored those texts like they were undiscovered countries. I read it over and over and learned a great deal of it by heart.

But before all that there was you, Mary Sheridan.

MARY: Now, there you are.

LADY G: You were my nurse... my Nanny…

MARY: I was. From when you were a wee leanbh, I told you stories of the Tain Bo Cuailnge and tales of the sidhe and banshees and stories of old Ireland.

LADY G: And Kilala in ’

. You told me stories of then…

MARY: Sure ya’ know I worked for the family of Hamilton Rowan – the Fenian Rebel! I heard the cries of the people when the French landed at Kilala to free Ireland.

(She sings) "OH THE FRENCH ARE ON THE SEA," SAYS THE SEAN BHEAN BHOCHT, "THE FRENCH ARE ON THE SEA," SAYS THE SEAN BHEAN BHOCHT, "OH THE FRENCH ARE IN THE BAY, THEY'LL BE HERE WITHOUT DELAY, AND THE ORANGE WILL DECAY," SAYS THE SEAN BHEAN BHOCHT. LADY G: Agus mhúin tú gaeilge dom. You taught me Irish.

MARY: No, I didn’t.

LADY G: O but you did…

MARY: No. Your mother wouldn’t let you. She told you it was uncouth and not a lady’s language --only one the servants spoke. God help her. Sure, she was right.

LADY G: She was not right. You opened the door and you let me in. I might never have known.

MARY: You liked the rebel ballads right enough. Arabella, your sister, used to give you six pence if you got your bible studies right and you spent it buying rebel pamphlets in Lough Rea. I mind you standing on tiptoe at the counter and Ould

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Johnny who ran the stationary shop said you were his best customer for Fenian books!

Do you remember Arabella bought you The Spirit of the Nation for your birthday?

You kept at her until she agreed to buy you that “Fenian rag” – so she wrote on the inside page, “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”

LADY G: The last refuge of a scoundrel. A scoundrel! Perhaps I was. I like that!

My chief memory was that of being ignored.

You see I was the youngest girl in a family of 16. That was a large number for a protestant house-- the Catholics being more prone to pro-creation. Someone once wrote that I was “the Cinderella of the clan”.

My mother certainly believed I was doomed to a life of spinsterhood.

I was, after all, twenty-six years of age and was more likely to be found alone on a hillside with a book of poetry or visiting the poor in a workhouse than fanning myself in a drawing room.

But then my brother Richard fell ill with TB. It was visiting a lot of houses in those days. My mother brought him to Cannes in the south of France for the warmer weather. I was recruited to accompany them to help with the nursing.

It was there I met my prince: Sir William Gregory – a close neighbour from back home in Galway - in a place called Coole Park. He was such a kind and worldly gentleman and was so attentive to us during a most difficult time with Richard.

To be honest, he didn’t really seem like a Prince when I first met him –more like a delightful, brilliant uncle.

When we returned to Galway, my brother and I visited him at Coole Park so he could show me his library which was vast and full of classic and exotic wonders.

He took me and my brother for a drive by the lake that touched those woodlands I was to know so well and that Willie, some years later, would make known to so many.

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YEATS:

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The trees are in their autumn beauty, The woodland paths are dry, Under the October twilight the water Mirrors a still sky; Upon the brimming water among the stones

LADY G and YEATS: Are nine-and-fifty swans.

YEATS:

But now they drift on the still water, Mysterious, beautiful; Among what rushes will they build, By what lake’s edge or pool Delight men’s eyes when I awake someday To find they have flown away?

LADY G: To find they have flown away? Nine and fifty swans…mmm. There were often so many more. I once counted over a hundred swans majestically dipping their heads. But nine and fifty, Mr. Yeats? Yes. It’s all about the rhythm of the lyric.

When we returned after our drive, Sir William surprised me by telling me he had recently changed his will and because of my unbridled enthusiasm for the words, I was to be left the choice of any six books I would like from the library.

You see he was fond of me and I had come to like him very much. He was older, yes, almost by thirty-five years but he cared for the things I cared for. He loved books, he loved art; he was kind and compassionate to the people on his estate.

Some of you may be surprised to hear this about my dear husband. We know the Gregory name was anathema during and in the years following the Great Hunger. You see Sir William was a member of parliament for Dublin during those dreadful times. There were wretched conditions amongst the peasantry following the crop failure and he was extremely active in trying to find relief for the neediest cases.

SIR WILLIAM: But unfortunately, I would always be remembered by the clause I introduced whereby owners of land that exceeded one quarter of an acre would not be entitled to get relief from the Government. It was my belief that however little subsistence a quarter of an acre could bring, it was more than the thousands

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of others who were completely destitute. So really, I was trying to bring relief to the neediest.

But the law which became known as the “Gregory Clause” was abused by corrupt landlords who used it to increase evictions by giving the people the choice of the poorhouse or starvation.

BALLADEER: (sings Skibbereen) OH WELL DO I REMEMBER THAT BLEAK DECEMBER DAY THE LANDLORD AND THE SHERIFF CAME TO DRIVE US ALL AWAY THEY SET MY ROOF ON FIRE WITH THEIR CURSED ENGLISH SPLEEN AND THAT’S ANOTHER REASON WHY I LEFT OLD SKIBBEREEN SIR WILLIAM: I became the personification of all the evils of the famine LADY G: But it was not true.

SIR WILLIAM: Of course, it was not true! What people forget is that of the 125 members of parliament –many of them Irish --only 9 voted against it. Those who really understood the condition of the country have always regarded this clause as a salvation. Didn’t my own father die from fever caught when visiting the poor?

LADY G: One need only look at how generously he treated the tenants of his own estate and how beloved he was to know that his judgments were based on humaneness and decency.

O all right. I’ll stop. I don’t want it to seem like the lady is protesting too much. It was a long time ago –and many decades before our meeting at the library in Coole Park House.

He left shortly after our time in the woods to visit his home in London and I found myself thinking about him as I dutifully tended to my chores at Roxborough.

Then one morning I opened a sealed letter. It was written from London.

WILLIAM: “Miss Persse: May I say something that may appear presumptuous. If it offends, please tell me and it won’t be spoken again. You have been admirably