Irish Theatre in America: Essays on Irish Theatrical Diaspora (review)

{ 153 } BOOK REV IEwS \ Irish Theatre in America: Essays on Irish Theatrical Diaspora. Edited by John P. Harrington . Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2009. xix + 226 pp. $24.95 cloth. Irish Theatre in America: Essays on Irish Theatrical Diaspora, edited by John P. Harrington, features thirteen essays from the third conference of the Irish Theatrical Diaspora Project, held at NewYork University’s Glucksman Ireland House in April 2006. In his introduction, Harrington asserts that these essays contribute to the “evolving subject area on how Ireland’s relationships with the world have been more complex than they are often represented and how the ‘wider world’ is already developing new relationships with Ireland”(xiv). In addressing such a field, specifically relating to America, the anthology can boast a number of important essays. Mick Moloney opens the collection with an insightful essay on the latenineteenth -century Harrigan and Hart phenomena with their comedic and musical Mulligan Guard shows. Moloney traces the history of the Ed Harrigan and Tony Hart (Cannon) partnership with the songwriting foundation of Harrigan and David Braham. The essay notes that the Harrigan and Hart depictions of contemporary urban working-class immigrant life “affords us a unique window not just into the evolution of Irish America but into America itself” (18). Harrigan and Hart are complemented by Maureen Murphy’s“From Scapegrace to Grasta: Popular Attitudes and Stereotypes in Irish American Drama,” which traces Irish drama in America from 1830 to 1965 as it mirrors immigration and assimilation. Murphy attempts to define the difference between Irish drama in Ireland and Irish drama in America: the former grew from a “legacy of colonialism” or “want of work,” while the latter grew from the premise that the Irish in America found work; hence, the appeal of Harrigan and Hart–type entertainments (21–22). Murphy eventually touches on the Abbey Theatre’s 1911 U.S. tour, which influenced the American Little Theatre movement, leading her to Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night as an example of Irish American drama’s“legacy of emigration”(32). Unfortunately, neither Murphy nor any other scholar in the anthology writing on Irish American drama makes mention of O’Neill’s A Touch of the Poet—that most Irish of Irish American plays. Two essays that are well coupled are Deirdre McFeely’s“Between Two Worlds: Boucicault’s The Shaughraun and Its New York Audience”and Gwen Orel’s“Reporting the Stage Irishman: Dion Boucicault in the Irish Press.” McFeely explores the Irish audience that rejected The Shaughraun’s imaging, despite the { 154 } BOOK REV IEwS play’s New York success, as expressed in a debate of letters in the Irish World. The paper’s correspondents “wanted an Irish drama to . . . establish the Irish race as culturally different from both the British and Anglo-Americans,” with Catholicism, abstinence, and nationalism as ideals (59). Orel provides further context on the overall Boucicault debate in the Irish American press in the 1860s and 1870s by recalling the fact that Boucicault’s Irish plays were not admired by Catholic American papers. One of the highlights of the collection is Lucy McDiarmid’s “The Abbey, Its ‘Helpers,’ and the Field of Cultural Production in 1913.” The essay explores the efforts of Lady Gregory and W. B. Yeats to raise funds for the Dublin Municipal Gallery of Modern Art during the Abbey Theatre’s early 1913 American tour, using performances of Gregory and Yeats’s The Pot of Broth, Gregory ’s Hyacinth Halvey, and G. B. Shaw’s American work, The Shewing­up of Blanco Posnet. McDiarmid relates Gregory’s efforts in courting wealthy Americans , the“helpers”who assisted in the fund-raising, and the controversy that resulted when Dublin Corporation voted in September 1913 not to proceed with establishing the gallery to house Hugh Lane’s modern paintings (which he was giving to Dublin provided the city build the gallery). Contextualizing her essay through 1913, McDiarmid reveals that the Abbey actors, with the Dublin Lockout as their backdrop, petitioned Gregory and Yeats for the money raised through their performances of the above plays in America. Gregory and Yeats had wanted to retain the money until a later date when the...