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3 8 3 Ireland Rearranged Contemporary Irish Drama and the Irish American Stage c h r i s t o p h e r l . b e r c h i l d At the beginning of the twenty-first century—when so much extraordinary social, political, economic, and cultural change is occurring in the Republic of Ireland—it is imperative that a critical eye be leveled on contemporary Irish drama and performance in an attempt to assess this change through what many feel is society’s most effective reflection. While many studies have been launched over the last few decades analyzing and revising the “version” of Ireland that is being presented on the contemporary Irish stage, there has been surprisingly little scrutiny of the Ireland that is being presented within Irish diasporic communities around the world—including what is arguably the largest and most influential Irish diasporic community, the Irish American community. It is imperative for the study of the contemporary Irish identity to examine what this community is presented with onstage as “authentically” Irish. In this chapter, I discuss the state of contemporary Irish theater being produced today, specifically on Irish American stages, through a brief examination of selected Irish American theater companies, their company missions, and their production choices over the past two decades. I briefly address the specific contemporary Irish works that are most often selected to present contemporary “Irishness” to American audiences, especially the culturally engaged audiences of the aforementioned Irish American theater companies, and the version of Ireland that is offered to these audiences through these plays. In approaching this work, I chose to take my own research interests— the representation of contemporary Ireland on the Irish stage—and examine this same trend but through a different lens—the Irish American experience. Ireland Rearranged | 39 However, when I began to examine the works that were most often produced on a nationwide level, certain patterns began to emerge. Upon further narrowing the scope of my research, I found that Irish drama that challenges nostalgic notions of “the auld sod” fight a predominantly uphill battle that mirrors the recent trends in native Irish drama along the same lines. But in the United States, especially among the aforementioned hyphenated community, nostalgia concerning the contemporary state of Ireland takes on a new level of complexity—that of nostalgic exile, which often creates a nearly absolute insistence within Irish American communities of a unified and often romanticized (problems and all) image of Ireland that is central to their diasporic identity. In the current trends section of the journal Éire-Ireland, Irish theater scholar Anthony Roche noted that 1989 was a transitional year for Irish drama that was decidedly antinostalgic in nature.1 Even though many scholars claim that the shift occurred many years earlier—1964 to be precise— with the premiere of Friel’s Philadelphia, Here I Come!, Roche seems to indicate that it was in 1989 that theater had truly begun to present a new version of Irishness that began to evade the specter of the past and to forge new roads into the future that exist independently of the traditional tropes of land, religion, language, and nationalism. Fintan O’Toole, in his “Irish Theatre: The State of the Art,” even goes so far as to say that there is no longer a dramatic conflict in terms of these traditional tropes as they no longer exist in contemporary Ireland.2 Even in Ireland, this trend was painfully slow in its effective development . Declan Hughes, in his 2000 diatribe “Who the Hell Do We Still Think We Are,” asks “why does contemporary Irish literature ignore contemporary Ireland?” and notes that “too often when I go to the theatre, I feel like I’ve stepped into a time capsule: even plays supposedly set in the present seem burdened by the compulsion to . . . well, in the narrowest sense, be Irish.”3 Though Hughes has admitted that he had somewhat slipped into hyperbole with this article, he did succeed in identifying a significant trend in Irish drama—that “nostalgia is in many ways the Irish disease”—which I will extend to the Irish American reception of the selfsame drama. But more recent trends in Irish drama have revealed a new way of presenting the island nation onstage that has moved in tandem with many of the economic and social changes that have effected Ireland during, and especially following, the now-legendary Celtic Tiger. [3...

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