Acclaimed actors, playwrights, directors and scholars join in symposiums, readings, performances
By: Jocelyn Hanamirian
Celebrating Irish theater and the donation announced last month of an extensive Irish theater collection to Princeton University’s Firestone Library, the university hosted international theater luminaries this weekend for a symposium titled "Players and the Painted Stage."
Acclaimed actors, playwrights, directors and scholars participated in a multi-faceted reflection on Irish theater, which included panel discussions on the role of theater in politics and national identity, along with readings from Samuel Beckett plays and a reading of a previously unpublished Sean O’Casey play, "The Cooing of Doves."
The symposium, which was free and open to the public, ran concurrently with the opening of the Leonard L. Milberg Irish Theater Collection at Firestone and performances of Brian Friel’s "Translations" at McCarter Theatre.
The collection is a landmark for theater scholarship for its manuscript of "The Cooing of Doves," which had long been considered lost even by the playwright. Mr. Milberg, a 1953 graduate, gave the collection in honor of Paul Muldoon, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and director of the new University Center for the Creative and Performing Arts. It includes more than 1,000 plays, photographs and playbills, and spans 160 years of Irish theater history, beginning in the mid-19th century.
"This is a conversation that I think we’ve started here that I’d like to think we’ll continue in the next few years in classes, lectures and various arenas," Professor Muldoon said in an interview Saturday. "The gift is going to secure a large interest in Princeton as a place of scholarship in Irish theater."
Among the weekend’s participants were actor Stephen Rea, Oscar-nominated for his performance in the "Crying Game"; Garry Hynes, the first woman to win a Tony award for best director; Fiach mac Conghail, artistic director of Dublin’s Abbey Theater; and Emily Mann, artistic director of McCarter Theatre. Professor Muldoon, Mr. Rea, playwright Mark O’Rowe, Mr. mac Conghail, and others performed in the first-ever reading of "The Cooing of Doves." Ms. Hynes, the artistic director of Galway’s Druid Theater, is directing McCarter’s current production of "Translations," running through Oct. 29.
The play, which explores Irish identity through language and whose actors speak at times in thick Irish accents, helped focus symposium conversation on the difficulties of staging an authentically Irish play for American audiences.
"You are looking at a play that’s coming from another culture. You’re looking at a play about language," Ms. Hynes said of "Translations" during a discussion on directing Irish theater. "You don’t go into a Shakespeare production expecting to understand every word. Understanding and clarity is not the most important thing you can do (as a director)."
Panelists discussed how the existence of a national theater differentiates Irish drama from American work. The Abbey, co-founded by William Butler Yeats in 1904, is Ireland’s national theater. Mr. mac Conghail pointed out that it is the only national theater that pre-dates the establishment of its state, and that this has fostered the long history of political significance of the Abbey.
"A citizen can engage in what is happening through the Abbey," Mr. mac Conghail said.
Ms. Mann said the not-for-profit theater movement in America is essentially this country’s national theater, citing McCarter as among this trend. While Ms. Hynes and Ms. Mann identified America’s lack of state support for the arts as problematic, Mr. mac Conghail noted how public support does not exist on the same scale in Ireland.
"I can’t see a successful businessman in Ireland supporting an event like this (symposium)," he said. "The personal act of citizenship is remarkable."
At a panel on the past, present and future of Irish theater, Mr. Rea likened the exhibition of the Milburg collection at Firestone Library to "seeing my life in the glass," having performed in many of the plays featured.
Luke Gibbons, a professor of Irish studies at Notre Dame University and a leading Irish cultural critic, reflected on how theater will respond to Ireland’s demographic changes in recent years.
"When theater was revived 100 years ago, Ireland was looking to create an identity," Professor Gibbons said. "Instead of being a country of outflows, it has become a country of inflows (in terms of immigration). I’d love to think theater would be at the heart of that. Ireland is now of the first-world caliber of the country that once colonized it."
Michael Cadden, director of the university’s Program in Theater and Dance, moderated the panel discussions and was struck by the comparisons of Irish and American theater.
"I think hearing about theater that really does think about itself as not part of an industry but part of the intellectual and cultural life of a country it’s really just nice to be working with people who are thinking about this, to be reminded that those are the questions," Mr. Cadden said in an interview Saturday.
As a literary companion to the symposium, the Princeton University Library Chronicle has put out a special Irish theater issue, comprising the first publication of "The Cooing of Doves" and 40 essays on the history of Irish theater by Professor Muldoon, Mr. Friel, Mr. Rea, the playwright Edward Albee and other scholars and writers. Celebration of the Milberg collection will continue in November with the university’s Program in Theater and Dance’s student production of John Millington Synge’s "The Playboy of the Western World."

