Description
City Theater Company rounds out their 30th Anniversary Season in 2024 with Brian Friel’s Dancing At Lughnasa. Dedicated to the playwright’s mother and aunts, this beloved Irish “memory play” revolves around the lives – and loves – of five sisters in a small Donegal town in 1936 during the summer harvest festival of Lughnasa.
Originally staged at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, Dancing At Lughnasa enjoyed a subsequent 1991 Tony-Award Winning Broadway run and a 2023 critically acclaimed revival at The National in London that featured actors from the popular T.V. show Derry Girls. It was also adapted for a feature film starring Meryl Streep.
Friel’s autobiographical masterpiece plays out through the memories of its narrator, who recounts the events of a single summer from his childhood in 1936 Ireland.
It is the summer harvest festival of Lughnasa, a time when the sun stays up well into the night and emotions are heightened in the small town of Ballybeg – particularly in the home young Michael Mundy shares with his single mother and her four sisters. His uncle has returned from an extended time in Africa, a shadow of the man and priest he once was, and his charming yet unreliable father once more enters the picture, throwing the household into chaos. And the five sisters at the center of it all – the play is dedicated “to the memory of those five brave Glenties women” – come together as one in their determination to keep body and soul together throughout this extraordinarily heady season.
Starring Daryan Borys, Kate Brennan, Éibhleann Clyne, Jessica Jordan, Aidan McDonald, Kerry Kristine McElrone, Paul McElwee, and Jennifer Youngblood.
Directed by Mary Catherine Kelley.
Stage Managed by Stuart Thomas. Choreographed by Dawn Morningstar. Music Directed by Joe Trainor. Dialect Coaching by Michael Toner. Set Design by Rick Neidig. House Manager Julie Snow Regan.
Promotional art by Joe del Tufo/Moonloop Photography and Joe Trainor.