presents

OPEN AUDITIONS  
Roles for 8 actors, 5 female and 3 male
Sunday, June   6 to 7 PM
Monday, June    7 to 9 PM
Auditions and performances at  Beatniks On Conkey

Dancing at Lughnasa
by Brian Friel
Directed by Andy Leahy

Dancing at Lughnasa by Brian Friel

This extraordinary play is the story of five unmarried sisters eking out their lives in a small village in Ireland in l936. We meet them at the time of the festival of Lughnasa, which celebrates the pagan god of the harvest with drunken revelry and dancing. Their spare existence is interrupted by brief, colorful bursts of music from the radio, their only link to the romance and hope of the world at large. The action of the play is told through the memory of the illegitimate son of one of the sisters as he remembers the five women who raised him, his mother and four maiden aunts. He is only seven in 1936, the year his elderly uncle, a priest, returns after serving for twenty-five years as a missionary in a Ugandan leper colony. For the young boy, two other disturbances occur that summer. The sisters acquire their first radio, whose music transforms them from correct Catholic women to shrieking, stomping banshees in their own kitchen. And he meets his father for the first time, a charming Welsh drifter who strolls up the lane and sweeps his mother away in an elegant dance across the fields. From these small events spring the cracks that destroy the foundation of the family forever. Widely regarded as Brian Friel's masterpiece, this haunting play is Friel's tribute to the spirit and valor of the past.

Cast

Michael, young man

Kate, 40, schoolteacher

Maggie, 38, housekeeper

Agnes, 35, knitter

Rose, 32, knitter

Christ, 26, Michael’s mother

Gerry, 33, Michael’s father

Jack, 53, missionary priest

Any questions about auditions can be directed to the director, via email:  andyleahy47@aol.com