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Irish Repertory Theatre is presenting Irishtown, a new play by Ciara Elizabeth Smyth, directed by Nicola Murphy Dubey. Irishtown features Emmy and Tony Award nominee Kate Burton, Saoirse-Monica Jackson, Kevin Oliver Lynch, Brenda Meaney, and Angela Reed, with voiceover work by Roger Clark.
“We could just devise an Irish play… How hard could it be?” The Irishtown Players, a celebrated Dublin-based theatre company, have just started rehearsals for their new play. After the astounding success of their last production, the company are scheduled to open on Broadway, with the same visionary playwright at the helm. However, trouble arises when the actors decide she’s going too dark, too experimental, and… not Irish enough? Taking matters into their own hands, the company fights to restore the Hibernian flair. Irishtown is a hilarious, searing new comedy that explores the commercialization of a culture and invites audiences to experience the fragile creative process and the potential collapse of a collective.
Irishtown was first presented in 2023 as part of Irish Rep’s New Works Summer Festival in the W. Scott McLucas Studio Theatre and was further developed in a workshop in Summer 2024 at Irish Rep.
Let’s see what the critics are saying about the new play…
Roma Torre, New York Stage Review: At its most chaotic, Irishtown brings to mind Noises Off, that classic farce about staging a play within a play in the British hinterland. Comedy, as they say, is hard; and it takes tremendous discipline and timing to pull it off. Under the tight direction of Nicola Murphy Dubey the company mostly meets the challenge though the humor occasionally seems forced. Still it’s quite a trip watching talented actors frantically portraying desperate actors acting badly.
Juliet Hindell, Exeunt: Irishtown is like a mashup of The Play That Goes Wrong (there’ s lot of slapstick humor) and a takedown of the pretentious creative process. The tension is maintained as we wait to see will-they-or-won’t-they come up with a new Irish masterpiece. Perhaps, with some light editing, we might even be watching the said masterpiece or at least a very good night of theater.
Thom Geier, Culture Sauce: If you’ve had the pleasure of attending performances at the Irish Repertory Theatre, you’ve grown accustomed to certain recurring themes and tropes in the grand tradition of Irish drama: domestic disputes that unfold in either Dublin or the remote countryside, with detours to the local pub of course, and feature the eventual revelation of long-buried family secrets. Ciara Elizabeth Smyth’s Irishtown, a wise craic-ing new comedy at the Irish Rep, is an affectionate and often hilarious riff on the genre’s many go-to clichés.
Average Rating:
76.7%
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