Results tagged “irish”

Ghosts, demons, and various otherworldly entities populate the plays of Conor McPherson, but the only spirit at work in Dublin Carol, which Scena Theatre is currently presenting in its professional Washington premiere, comes in a bottle labeled "Jameson". Of course, drink is also a staple of McPherson's work: the playwright, a recovering alcoholic himself, has long been concerned with the place of the bottle in the Irish identity. John (Matt Dougherty), the undertaker at the center of Carol is just one of many well soused McPherson protagonists, men for whom there is nothing so terrible as a look at the bottom of an empty glass.

"The whole point of living is preparing to die," says one character at a pivotal moment in Solas Nua's new production of Woman and Scarecrow. It's not just the point of life, but the point of the play itself, most of which is spent inside the mind of an unnamed woman as she spends her final hours succumbing, with both relief and reluctance, to an unnamed malady. If that sounds quite dark, well, it is. You were expecting something a little more uplifting from an Irish deathbed drama? But if it also sounds dreary, that's where you'd be wrong.