Dancing at Lughnasa – Sunday April 13 at 2PM

By Brian Friel

April 4, 5, 11, & 12, 2025 @ 7:30 pm; April 6 & 13, 2025 @ 2:00 pm
Tickets: $30 Adults, $15 Students 21 and Under

Directed by Erin Nicole Harrington
Choreographed by Darcy May
Featuring: Dan Costello* as Michael, Ted DeBonis as Jack, Neeley Dessaint as Maggie, Michael Giordano as Gerry, Tess McHugh as Christina, Sarah Murphy as Kate, Betsy Wilcox as Agnes, Jewel Winant as Rose

This extraordinary play follows five unmarried sisters eking out their lives in a small village in Ireland in 1936. We meet them during the festival of Lughnasa, a time of drunken revelry and dancing in honor of the pagan god of the harvest. Their spare existence is interrupted by brief, colorful bursts of music from the radio, their only link to the romance and hope of the world beyond. The action unfolds through the memory of the illegitimate son of one of the sisters as he recalls the five women who raised him—his mother and four maiden aunts.

He is only seven in 1936, the year his malaria-stricken uncle, a priest, returns after twenty-five years as a missionary in a Ugandan leper colony. That summer, two other disturbances shake his world. The sisters acquire their first radio, whose music transforms them from correct Catholic women to shrieking, stomping banshees in their own kitchen as they launch into a wild Irish step dance. And he meets his father for the first time—a charming Welsh drifter who strolls up the lane and sweeps his mother away in an elegant dance across the fields.

From these small events spring the cracks that will shatter the foundation of the family forever. Widely regarded as Brian Friel’s masterpiece, this haunting play is a tribute to the spirit and valor of rural life.

Winner of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play and the Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Broadway Play.

Chosen by Time magazine as one of the ten best plays for 1991, saying it is, “The most elegant and rueful memory play since The Glass Menagerie.”

“…this play does exactly what theater was born to do, carrying both its characters and audience aloft on those waves of distant music and ecstatic release that, in defiance of all language and logic, let us dance and dream just before night must fall.” —The New York Times.

“This is no way a play to be missed—simply a wondrous experience. Experience it.” —New York Post.

*Appears courtesy of Actors Equity Association