The sprawling anthology—wherein we follow a large number of characters as their lives overlap but rarely intersect directly—has been a constant presence at the movies for years. Although the genre was once an exclusive territory to which Robert Altman seemed to own the only set of keys, since the mid-90s, Quentin Tarantino, P.T. Anderson, and Alejandro González Iñárritu have all followed this loose pattern to big success—the producers of 2004’s Crash even got a Best Picture Oscar for their trouble. The anthology is less common in the theatre, where it poses practical problems. Lots of characters means lots of actors. Double or triple-casting would only further muddy the question of who’s who, which is always foremost in the minds of directors asking an audience to remember so many characters who individually have only meager stage time in which to form a lasting impression.

Northern Irish playwright Owen McCafferty’s Scenes from the Big Picture is one of the theatrical anthology’s rare specimens. First staged in 2001, it follows 21 characters over the course of a single day in a fictitious section of Belfast. In this regard, you can add Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing to its list of cinematic influences. Besides the one-day timeframe, the play shares with Lee’s “joint” an omission of one key element its setting would seem to demand: Just as Do the Right Thing is set in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn circa 1989, but makes no mention of the crack epidemic of the time, Scenes from the Big Picture sidesteps entirely Northern Ireland’s “Troubles.” As McCafferty explained after the opening-night performance at Catholic University last week, setting the play in a real Belfast neighborhood would in itself make the play political—though recent events may finally change this, geography in Northern Ireland is ideology. And McCafferty didn’t want to write about these characters’ beliefs. He wanted to write about their lives.