The festival commemorates the centennial of the 1916 Easter Rising and launches a year-long celebration of the Kennedy Center’s namesake.

Vice President Joe Biden, speaking at a White House reception yesterday for Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny, couldn’t make his remarks without slipping into an anecdote about his ancestors from the green and hilly isle.

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”.

John Tweel and Madeleine Carr in ‘Improbable Frequency’. Photo by Dan Brick. 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…

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…

Photo by Erica Bruce 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…

It’s sometimes poetic. It’s sometimes haunting. It’s consistently, well, long. A hard sell, ’tis, this Portia Coughlin. Marina Carr ‘s allusive, surreal, and ultimately turgid play gets its D.C. premiere in a confused and confusing production by Solas Nua, the great theater company dedicated to works by living Irish dramatists. The show certainly doesn’t lack for ambition, but it’s somehow both overcooked and undernourished, boasting several fine performances but ultimately sunk by a muddled narrative,…

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…