The inaugural New Works Summer Festival is part of Irish Repertory Theatre’s New Play Development Program, which includes table reads, staged readings, workshops and commissions from voices that fulfill Irish Rep’s mission and tell stories of Irish and Irish-American people of all races, genders, abilities and orientations. The program will provide opportunities for playwrights to further develop their work and enable Irish Rep to discover new plays and musicals for future production.
The schedule is as follows:
June 20
Irishtown
by Ciara Elizabeth Smyth
It's a week before the opening of a new Irish play on Broadway and in the rehearsal room, the cast are panicking. The writer’s previous play was a smash hit, a drama set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. She’s been commissioned off the back of it and the producers expect another instant classic. Except her new play is about sexual harassment and talking seagulls. The cast are worried the script is dated, too weird and nowhere near Irish enough for American audiences. When the writer comes into the rehearsal room to watch a run, an argument erupts and the fate of the script hangs in the balance. Not wanting to blow their shot on Broadway, the cast feel it is now their duty to devise an "Irish Play." Irishtown is a biting satire about theatre, consent and what it means to be Irish.
June 21
ERIS
by John King
Seán is feeling wronged because his boyfriend Tim has been excluded from a family wedding back home in Ireland. What does it matter that they've just broken up? The problem for his family is that Tim is femme, fabulous and, worst of all, English. Spurred on by righteous anger, Seán is determined to do something about it. As Greek myths, hook-up apps and the musical stylings of Sinéad O'Connor collide, Seán grapples with what it means to be a disruptive force for those closest to you.
June 22
Drip Feed
by Karen Cogan
Dancing on tables and 3am breakfast rolls. But what if you wake up hungover and broken on the wrong person’s doorstep, realize you’ve got it wrong, all wrong, and it might just be too late? Drip Feed is a fast, infectious, dark comedy about the messiness of being a young(ish), queer woman in Ireland. Shortlisted for Soho Theatre’s Verity Bargate Award, this new play from the Stewart Parker Trust Award winner had successful runs at Edinburgh, Dublin and London.
June 23
Motherland
by May Treuhaft-Ali
Shavon and Samaya meet at a Women of Color Maternity Group in Chicago and devise a plan to raise their children in rural Ireland. Their hopes of starting a new life are complicated when they discover that the land itself is haunted by a history that is not unlike their own.
June 24
Once Before I Go
by Phillip McMahon
Told against the backdrop of Dublin's burgeoning gay rights movement of the 1980s and 1990s and the contemporary LGBTQ+ community of today, Once Before I Go charts the close friendship of Lynn, Daithí and the luminous Bernard, and sits on the exhilarating edge between comedy, tragedy and melodrama. Exploring the fragile yet resilient bonds of Irish queer lives across three decades in Dublin, London and Paris, the play steps between the early days of the AIDS crisis and today's LGBTQ+ community, living in an era of marriage equality, gender self-determination and untransmittable HIV. At once political, joyous and heart-breaking, Once Before I Go honours the fabulous people we lost along the way and celebrates those who fight on. Once Before I Go premiered at Dublin's Gate Theatre in October 2021.
