Oh, the Irish and their love of words. The lilting rhythms of Yeats, the biting satire of Shaw, the heady impenetrability of Joyce. And then there's the London-born, but Irish-derived McDonagh brothers, Martin and John Michael, and their great love for the many uses of the word "fuck". more ›

The Capital Fringe Festival may be a hot, steamy, distant memory, but don't tell Solas Nua that. To open their sixth season, the theater company has tapped into that festival's rag-tag, anything-goes spirit with their first musical, Improbable Frequency. The play, written by Arthur Riordan, with music by an Irish group known as Bell Helicopter, actually did start out as a Fringe hit: at the Edinburgh festival in 2006. With their D.C. production, Solas Nua takes over a bare, as-yet-unused floor of a new office building on K Street NE, and transforms it into an alternative performance space that makes full use of the size and openness provided. more ›

Conor McPherson loves a good ghost story. While not all of his works for the stage include literal spectres and otherworldly figures, even when his plays take place on the firm ground of reality, they still very often deal with loss, in a way that casts the ghostly shadow of memory and regret across the proceedings. In the case of his first film since 2003's The Actors, all of these elements, conveyed in the typically Irish fashion that is McPherson's trademark, are in play. more ›

Another March, another run of sold-out Pogues shows at the 9:30 Club. Despite the propitious occasion of St. Patrick’s Day — the equinox 'round which the graying-but-still-preeminent purveyors of Emerald Isle folk-punk (funk?) book their East Coast tours in recent years — Tuesday night’s hootenanny was no more gleefully shitfaced than their 9:30 gig from last year on March 9. In fact, it was arguably less so: Frontman Shane MacGowan seemed more lucid than the last time he stumbled through town, and his snarled vocals more intelligible. And the other seven active-duty Pogues? Affable, enthusiastic professionals all -- especially Spider Stacy, the group's tin whistler and fill-in frontman who who bashed a metal tray against his head whenever additional percussion was required. The mid-show appearance of a two-man horn section gave a warm shading to several unabashedly sentimental tunes, but especially a late-in-the-game “Rainy Night in SoHo.” more ›

It’s sometimes poetic. It’s sometimes haunting. It’s consistently, well, long. more ›

What better time than the day after the State of the Union address to be reminded that exaggeration, obfuscation, and just-plain-making-shit-up can be employed for benign purposes as well as sinister ones? Solas Nua's Trad is a show that delights in benevolent hyperbole like no other in recent memory, and its pleasures are plentiful indeed. Playwright Mark Doherty's wry, spry meditation on tradition and familial identity and especially -- O! How we we wish there was another word for this! -- blarney, falls somewhere in between Waiting for Godot and Waking Ned Devine on the sliding scale of existential Irish fearlessness vs. adorable, tweed-jacketed stereotypes. more ›