John Keating

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Molly Sweeney

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Molly Sweeney

It’s often been said that the problem with talking about the disabled is that they are defined by their dis-abilities rather than their abilities. The profundity of this perspective emerges in a moving narrative about a beautiful, blind Irishwoman who is given the gift of sight and how that changes her life and that of her husband and her doctor. In Irish Repertory Theatre’s Molly Sweeney, the last of the Friel Project offerings, prolific Irish playwright and author Brian Friel aptly illustrates how that gift is a mixed blessing.

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Translations

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Translations

More than 40 years have passed since Brian Friel’s Translations premiered, but Doug Hughes’s haunting new production shows that this play remains relevant as it explores the darker issues surrounding Anglo-Irish relations and the profound problem of language.

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Autumn Royal

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Autumn Royal

There’s a moment early in Kevin Barry’s darkly comic Autumn Royal, currently running at the Irish Rep under the direction of Ciarán O’Reilly, when siblings May (Maeve Higgins) and Timmy (John Keating), both in their 30s in Cork city, Ireland, realize that the current predicament of caring for their psychotic, decrepit, slowly dying father might have no end in sight.

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Terra Firma

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Terra Firma

Despite the title, Barbara Hammond’s futuristic drama Terra Firma is ironically on shaky ground. Having its world premiere at Baruch Performing Arts College, the play is set on an abandoned platform of a country that experience a “Big War” some 50 years earlier. There, three characters have abandoned the mainland and commandeered the site. Sporadically there are explosions on shore—the conflict is apparently not over, or is it?

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The Naturalists

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The Naturalists

The three principal characters of Jaki McCarrick’s drama The Naturalists are refugees from a society that, in their view, damages the earth and is toxic to the human heart. The time is 2010; the place, the Republic of Ireland’s Border Region. Brothers Francis and Billy Sloane (John Keating and Tim Ruddy) have settled into middle age as small-time farmers, accustomed to being alone with each other and the glorious landscape around them.

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