Thomas Kilroy, one of Ireland’s most distinguished playwrights, and author and WUSTL alumnus Adrian Frazier, Ph.D., will present “A Weekend of Irish Drama” Oct. 22-23 at the University.
At 4 p.m. today, Kilroy and Frazier will speak on contemporary Irish drama.
At 1:30 p.m. Oct. 23, they will be present for a dramatic reading of Kilroy’s most recently produced play, The Shape of Metal. The reading will be followed by a discussion with director Heidi Vogel, of Saint Louis University, and the three-person cast: Sally Eaton, Peggy Kols and Tarah Demant.
Both events — sponsored by the Department of English and The Writing Program, both in Arts & Sciences — are free and open to the public and will take place in Hurst Lounge, Duncker Hall, Room 201. A reception will follow each.
Kilroy’s plays include The Death and Resurrection of Mr. Roche (1968); The O’Neill (1969); Talbot’s Box (1973); Sex and Shakespeare (1976); Double Cross (1986); The Madam MacAdam Travelling Theater (1992); and The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde (1997).
He has also adapted Chekov’s The Seagull (1981); Ibsen’s Ghosts (1989); and Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (1996), and published a novel, The Big Chapel (1971), which was short-listed for the Booker Prize.
Kilroy describes himself as “fascinated and often appalled by what happens when the intense concentrated hopes, fears and beliefs of the private person are subjected to the fragmenting, diffusionary effects of public life.”
The Shape of Metal, for example, explores the conflicted relationship between a brilliant and unyielding sculptor, Nell Jeffrey, and her two daughters: Grace, who left her mother’s studio 30 years before, and the confrontational Judith.
Other works have focused on a gay man victimized by Dublin toughs; a 19th-century workers’ saint; William Joyce (better known as Lord Haw-Haw); and Constance Wilde, wife of Oscar Wilde.
Born in 1943 in Callan, County Kilkenny, Kilroy served as play editor at the Abbey Theatre in 1977 and became director of Field Day Theatre Co. in 1988. He is a member of both the Royal Society of Literature and the Irish Academy of Letters, and a former professor of modern English at the University of Ireland, Galway.
Frazier is the author of Beyond the Scenes: Yeats, Horniman, and the Struggle for the Abbey Theatre (1990) and George Moore, 1852-1933 (2000). He earned a doctorate in English from WUSTL in 1979, writing his dissertation on Irish poetry after Yeats, and is a member of the theater faculty at the University of Ireland, Galway.
For more information, call 935-7130.