Eugene O Neill Festival

Welcome to New Ross by the Cathaoirleach of New Ross Municipal Council.

Welcoming the civic delegation from Danville CA, the Directors of the Eugene O’Neill Foundation and the members of the Eugene O’Neill Society and the Artistic Director of the festival Eric Fraisher Hayes and all the actors participating in the 2024 Eugene O’Neill International Festival of Theatre

Followed by Traditional Irish Music Session with Danescastle Music Group.

Rose has arrived at her childhood home to celebrate Christmas with her family. She brings the news that she wishes to take her developmentally challenged grown son Teddy to live with her, away from the only home he has ever known with his grandparents. Old feuds flare up between mother and daughter in a showdown over what is best for the young man and who it fit to be a mother with dramatic results.

Teddy by author and playwright Sheila Forsey, will be a world premiere featuring Irish and American actors. Two countries, one family.

Green Road and some special guests will perform a concert of trad, folk and ballad music, with tones of bluegrass and Americana, celebrating the strong connection between folk music of Ireland and the USA.

Borrowing from the collected experience gained through directing 34 plays by Eugene O’Neill, Eric Fraisher Hayes, Artistic Director at the Eugene O’Neill National Historic Site, Tao House, has created a pair of adaptations of O’Neill’s fledging one-acts that shine new light on the playwright’s earliest works. In the true spirit of cultural collaboration and exchange, these plays will feature Irish and American actors.

What would happen if we took a play about a desperate woman (Mrs. Rowland in O’Neill’s Before Breakfast) and a play about a desperate man (James Knapp in O’Neill’s Warnings) and looked at them as a single story of a couple experiencing a breakdown in communication? Warnings Before Breakfast weaves these separate worlds into a tale of a relationship in crisis with surprising results.

In 1913 an aspiring young playwright (Eugene O’Neill) brings his first play script to the dressing room of his famous actor father (James O’Neill) in the hope of getting his father to play the lead role. A Wife for a Life: A Backstage Story imagines a dressing room argument over the nature of life and art between the famous actor father and the soon-to-be famous playwright son. The young man’s script becomes the battleground for this clash over the value of theatre and the human need for truth and illusion.

We invite scholars, educators, and theatre artists to draft papers or artistic pieces (8-10 minutes) that speak to the theme of mourning and redemption in the work of Eugene O’Neill.