Nine Irish Plays for Voices

EAMON GRENNAN

360 pages, 9 b/w illustrations

9781531502546, Hardback, $39.95 (HC), £36.00

Simultaneous electronic edition available

MARCH

Theater & Performance | Poetry

General Interest

“This insightful and enlightening volume, Eamon Grennan’s Nine Irish Plays for Voices, brings the audience or reader through the famine of the nineteenth century up to a more recent conversation featuring an old man in a multiracial and multicultural Ireland reflecting on Ireland’s past and future. This book of plays will be a welcome way for readers and theatrical companies to rethink Irish history, global Irishness, and the present.”

—ELIZABETH BREWER REDWINE, SETON HALL UNIVERSITY

“This collection of nine plays for voices will be of enormous interest to readers who want to deepen their knowledge of theater, Irish culture, and the relationship between great literature and society. It provides new perspectives on such well-known figures as James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Peig Sayers—while also offering an innovative approach to Irish history. These plays were written to be performed live, making the book valuable to theater companies and directors everywhere. But they also work beautifully as dramatic literature, meaning that this is a volume that can be read from cover to cover with pleasure.”

—PATRICK LONERGAN, UNIVERSITY OF GALWAY

A vibrant collection of short plays bringing Irish history and culture alive through an extraordinary collage of documents, songs, poems, and texts.

In Nine Irish Plays for Voices, award-winning poet Eamon Grennan delves deep into key Irish subjects—big, small, literary, historical, political, biographical—and illuminates them for today’s audiences and readers. These short plays draw from original material centering on important moments in Irish history and the formation of the Irish Republic, such as the Great Famine and the Easter Rising; the lives of Irish literary figures like Yeats, Joyce, and Lady Gregory; and the crucial and life-changing condition of emigration.

The rhythmic, musical, and vivid language of Grennan’s plays incorporates traditional song lyrics, lines of Irish poetry, and letters and speeches of the time. The result is a dramatic collage that tells a story through the voices of characters contemporary to the period of the play’s subject. By presenting subjects through the dramatic rendering of the human voice, the plays facilitate a close, intimate relationship between players and the audience, creating an incredibly powerful connection to the past. Historical moments and literary figures that might seem remote to the present-day reader or audience become immediate and emotionally compelling.

One of the plays, Ferry, is drawn entirely from the author’s imagination. It puts unnamed characters who come from the world of twentieth-century Ireland on a boat to the underworld with the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. On their journey the five strangers, played by two voices, tell stories about their lives, raising the question of how language both captures and transforms lived experience. Addressing the Great Famine, Hunger uses documentary evidence to give audiences a dramatic feel for what has been a silent and traumatic element in Irish history. Noramollyannalivialucia: The Muse and Mr. Joyce is a one-woman piece that depicts James Joyce’s wife as an older woman sharing her memories and snippets from the works of her husband. Also included in this rich volume is the author’s adaptation of Synge’s Aran Islands, as well as Emigration Road, History! Reading the Easter Rising, The Muse and Mr. Yeats, The Loves of Lady Gregory, and Peig: An Ordinary Life

EAMON GRENNAN is retired from the Dexter M. Ferry Jr. Chair of English at Vassar College. The most recent of his thirteen volumes of poetry are Plainchant (2022) and There Now (2015). He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lannan Foundation Poetry Prize, the Listowel Poetry Prize, the Poetry Now Award for Out of Breath (2007), and the PEN award for poetry in translation for Leopardi: Selected Poems by Giacomo Leopardi (1997).