The Sean O'Casey Season

The Francis J. Greenburger Mainstage

Moderated by: James Pethica

Panelists: Anne Margaret Daniel and John P. Harrington

Thursday, May 23 at 4pm

On May 23, explore the tumultuous and significant relationship between Sean O’Casey and Abbey Theatre founders Lady Gregory and WB Yeats in a free panel led by James Pethica, a Professor of Irish Studies, Drama and Modernism at Williams College.

In 1923, Dublin had been a battleground since the Easter Rising of 1916 was followed by the Irish War for Independence, and finally, a bitter Civil War. In this fraught context, the future of the Abbey Theatre, founded by William Butler Years, Lady Gregory, and Edward Martyn twenty years previously, was uncertain. Just in time, WB Yeats and Lady Gregory accepted Sean O’Casey’s The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), and its immediate commercial success, followed by Juno and the Paycock (1924) and The Plough and the Stars (1926), saved the Abbey from bankruptcy.

For this brief period, O’Casey enjoyed a close collaborative relationship with the Abbey founders. However, when they rejected his fourth play, The Silver Tassie, a very public spat began between Yeats and O’Casey as quarreling letters were published in The Irish Times for several weeks, ultimately severing their relationship. O’Casey lived and worked in England from that point forward.

This free discussion will explore the relationship between these three Irish luminaries and their effect on Irish theatrical history, from their earliest friendship to their public falling-out.

RESERVE SEATS

Biography of James Pethica, Panel Moderator:
James Pethica teaches Irish Studies, Drama and Modernism at Williams College. He received his B.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Oxford University. His publications include two volumes in the Cornell Yeats series; the Norton Yeats: A Critical Edition; and most recently Lady Gregory’s Early Irish Writings, 1883-1893. A former Director of the Yeats International Summer School, he is currently at work on the authorized biography of Lady Gregory for Oxford University Press.

The Francis J. Greenburger Mainstage

Moderated by: Maureen O’Rourke Murphy

Featuring Panelists: Stephen Butler and Maureen O’Rourke Murphy

Thursday, May 9 at 4pm

Regarded as one of the great Irish playwrights, Sean O’Casey’s reach extended far beyond his homeland beginning with his first published works, the Dublin Trilogy, now in repertory on the Irish Rep mainstage.

On May 9, explore O’Casey’s impact with a free panel discussion by two leading O’Casey scholars: Stephen Butler and Maureen O’Rourke Murphy. The panel will begin with the Dublin plays and their place in world theater and then expand to cover the global reception of O’Casey’s later work, particularly in Russia and Eastern Europe. The event will conclude with an open discussion between the panelists; audience questions are welcome.

Tickets are free to this special event. Unable to watch in person? Tune in on Facebook Live.

RESERVE SEATS

Biography of Maureen O’Rourke Murphy, Panel Moderator:
Maureen O’Rourke Murphy is the Joseph L. Dionne Professor of Curriculum and Teaching in the School of Education, Health, and Human Services at Hofstra University, in Hempstead, New York. A past president of the American Conference for Irish Studies and a past chair of the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures, Murphy was one of the six senior editors of the prizewinning Dictionary of Irish Biography published in nine volumes and online by the Royal Irish Academy and Cambridge University Press in 2009. Murphy directed the New York State Great Irish Famine Curriculum Project (2001), which won the National Conference for the Social Studies Excellence Award in 2002; she was the historian of the Irish Hunger Memorial in Battery Park City. She is currently the historian, with John Ridge, of the Mission of Our Lady of the Rosary/Watson House Project.

Murphy edited Irish Literature: A Reader (1987, rev. ed. 2006), with James MacKillop. She also edited Asenath Nicholson’s Annals of the Famine in Ireland (1998) and Ireland’s Welcome to the Stranger (2002). She edited Annie O’Donnell’s Your Fondest Annie in 2005.Her biography of Asenath Nicholson, Compassionate Stranger. Asenath Nicholson and the Great Irish Famine was published in 2016.

Murphy has been awarded honorary degrees by the State University of New York at Cortland and by the National University of Ireland. She received the President of Ireland’s Award for Service in 2015.