by W.B. Yeats
directed by Charlotte Moore & Ciarán O’Reilly
April 14th at 8pm: Irish Rep Mainstage
The Fiddle and The Pen
An informal night when musicians and writers share the stage, read their favorite poems and reveal the influence Yeats brought to their own works. Frank McCourt, Colm McCann, Peter Hamill, are amongst a cast of many who
April 17th at 8pm: Irish Rep Studio Theatre
Words Upon the Window Pane
Starring Geraldine Chaplin, Gerard McSorley, Donal Donnelly, Brid Brennan, and Jim Sheridan
Jonathan Swift, writer, politician and churchman, had two great and famous loves. Esther Johnson (Stella) became his lifelong companion after they met in England when he was a young man. Later on in life he began an affair, with Hester van Homrigh, whom he called Vanessa.Swift’s torment in life and death, his ‘savage indignation’ about the wrongs of the world and remorse for his treatment of these women, is the basis for the behavior of his spirit when it re-emerges during a séance exactly 200 years later, on the anniversary of Stella’s death. At the séance, a quest begins to uncover the identity of the disturbed spirits in order to put them to rest. Thrown together by this crisis, the spiritualists are forced to confront uncomfortable truths in their own lives.
The film, based on the play by W.B. Yeats, moves elegantly between the 18th and 20th centuries revealing that words have flesh and spirits have substance.
April 23rd at 7pm: Glucksman Ireland House, One Washington Mews
The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats
Distinguished Yeats scholars, Prof. John Kelly of St. John’s College, Oxford, and Prof. Ronald Schuchard of Emory University discuss their collaboration on the most recent volume of “one of the great works of literary scholarship of our time” (London Review of Books), The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats: Volume IV (OUP, 2005). This volume, covering the crucial years 1905-1907, was awarded the ninth Morton N. Cohen Award for a Distinguished Edition of Letters and is the fourth of a projected fifteen volumes.
Co-sponsored by the W.B. Yeats Society of New York. http://irelandhouse.fas.nyu.edu
April 25th at 3pm: Irish Rep Studio Theatre
Panel Discussion: Form and Idea in the Theater of Yeats
With Prof. James Flannery, Bill Whelan, and Roman Pasca
The Yeats’ plays are written in perhaps the widest range of styles of any dramatist in the history of the theater. In each of his plays, the form is integrally related to the ideas being explored. Drawing on their experience with the Yeats International Theatre Festival (1989-1993) at the Abbey Theatre, panelists will discuss the ways in which Yeats employed masks, music, dance, puppetry, and a variety of different acting styles and conventions to express his mythopoeic and mystical vision of the world.
Moderated by: Prof. James Flannery, Director of the W.B. Yeats Foundation at Emory University and Executive Director of the Yeats Festival. Panelists include: Bill Whelan, Composer of Riverdance and Composer and Music Director of the Yeats Festival; and Roman Pasca, internationally known master puppeteer who staged a production of The Shadowy Waters at the Yeats Festival.
April 22nd at 8pm: Irish Rep Studio Theatre
Sailing to Byzantium
A reading of a play by Sandra Deer
A story of love gone awry, against the backdrop of the Irish Rebellion of 1916 and World War I. It tells of Yeats, his secretary Ezra Pound, and their various loves of the Shakespeare women, Yeats and Olivia, the novelist and Pound and her daughter Dorothy. Directed By Kara Manning
April 30th at 7pm
American Irish Historical Society 991 5th Ave, New York NY 10028
A reading of
The Words Upon The Window Pane
by W.B Yeats
Using the eloquent setting of the beautiful and recently renovated American Irish Historical Society on 5th Ave, as a backdrop for the play set in an eloquent Georgian townhouse in Dublin, seven characters assemble to have a séance. The lost souls of Jonathan Swift, Stella, and his mistress Vanessa float through the air.
The evening also includes the screening of Yeats and the Esoteric.