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the third annual Eugene O'Neill International Festival of Theatre returns to St. Michael's Theatre New Ross, October 15th - 17th 2021
New Ross Drama Workshop presents
More Stately Mansions
Four Rivers presents
Eugene O'Neill One Act Plays
by Eugene O’Neill
The Beauty Queen of Leenane
in Rehearsed Readings:
in a Staged Reading
By Martin MacDonagh
Recklessness
Directed by Ben Barnes
Where the Cross is Made
Ireland’s first staging of this epic play in two parts
A Wife for Life
St Michael's Theatre, New Ross
St Michael's Theatre, New Ross
Saturday October 16th
Sunday 17th October 8.00pm
Friday 15th October 8.00pm
3.30pm and 8.00pm
Admission €23
Admission €12
Admission €30
The New Ross Drama Workshop will present a staged reading of three of Eugene O’ Neill’s plays at the opening night of the festival.
The play, as one commentator has put it, offers “a vision of American history which borrows from the past in order to create images of the present and future.”
A blackly comic modern Irish classic from renowned playwright and Golden Globewinning filmmaker Martin McDonagh (In Bruges, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri). It portrays the manipulative Mag and her virginal daughter Maureen as they play out a battle of mutual loathing against the beautiful but unforgiving backdrop of the Connemara hills.
Under the capable artistic direction of two of the group’s directorial protagonists Margaret Rossiter and Peggy Hussey, the members of the group will present rehearsed readings of ‘Recklessness’, ‘Where the Cross is Made’ & ‘A Wife for Life’. The plays, part of the author’s early work, allow the words of O’Neill to hold centre stage as themes of maritime adventures, prospecting in the wild west and the intricacies of love emerge.
Page 90 - 1st October 2021
The play features the familial tensions, the jealousies and resentments that typify O’Neill’s work and surface so memorably in his play Long Day’s Journey into Night, composed as O’Neill’s interest in the eleven play cycle waned. The play also examines the great figure in O’Neill, “the possessor selfdispossessed” (as the subtitle of the eleven play cycle puts it) or the man who gains the world only to lose his soul, a tragic phenomenon O’Neill explored repeatedly through his work.
Directed by Ben Barnes St Michael's Theatre, New Ross
Ben Barnes directs a cast led by Irish stage legend Marion O’Dwyer (as Mag), with Sarah Madigan, Mark Fitzgerald and Tiernan Messitt-Greene. n
