Irish Rep Season Ends With a Bang

AS the Irish Repertory Theatre's most artistically successful season to date draws to a close, artistic director Charlotte Moore and producing director Ciaran O'Reilly won't be basking in all the well-deserved accolades. The final play of the Rep's season opens this week, and plans are already afoot to host their 20th anniversary celebration with cocktails, dinner and entertainment at the Pierre Hotel on June 9.

"Because its our 20th anniversary we're bringing a lot of our company members back to perform pieces from some of the hit shows we've had," says O'Reilly.

"We've staged productions of Finian's Rainbow, The Streets of New York, and The Irish and How They Got That Way by Frank McCourt. We'll also stage an extract from Grandchild of Kings featuring Ciaran Sheehan (the Irish tenor who has sold out shows at Carnegie Hall)."

The Rep's annual fundraiser is always a celebrity-studded affair, but - in keeping with New York tradition - the stage and screen megastars who turn out each year to support the theater usually only confirm their attendance the day before the event.

"We'll have multi-Tony Award winners like Frances Sterne Higgins and Marian Seldes and many others," says O'Reilly. "The format will be like a cabaret with music and singing, with perhaps a bit of drama too."

Meanwhile, the final play of the Rep's 20th season, Prisoner of the Crown by Richard F. Stockton, will bring the brief but brilliant life of Irish patriot Sir Roger Casement to the stage when it opens this week.

Born in Kingstown - now called Dun Laoghaire - in Dublin in 1864, Casement was one of the brightest stars of the British consular service until he gained an international reputation for his humanitarian efforts in the Congo and later in Peru, exposing the forced labor the natives were subjected by the agents of colonial rubber companies.

Casement's reports created an international sensation, which resulted in his knighthood. With his passion for social justice, inspired in part by the democratizing lessons of his discreetly closeted homosexual life, he was one of the world's first great humanitarians in the modern sense.

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Nster.com