Irish Arts Center

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The United States vs Ulysses

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The United States vs Ulysses

Just ahead of Bloomsday, the annual celebration of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, Ireland’s Once Off Productions has arrived in Hell’s Kitchen with The United States vs Ulysses, the frisky entertainment now playing at the Irish Arts Center. Written by journalist/dramatist Colin Murphy, the play is intricately researched yet undidactic. Featuring a six-member cast from Ireland directed by Conall Morrison, it’s an imaginative, fresh-mouthed account of one of literary modernism’s most significant legal confrontations.

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Conversations After Sex

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Conversations After Sex

The racy, come-hither title of Mark O’Halloran’s 70-minute work disguises a fascinating drama en déshabillé that explores the loneliness that underlies anonymous sexual encounters and a desire by participants to connect more fully than only with sex. Though the conversations follow intercourse, they reveal more about the characters’ lives up to that point than what happens afterward. Staged with simplicity and power by Tom Creed, O’Halloran’s play is thought-provoking, sad, and thoroughly engaging.

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Chekhov’s First Play

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Chekhov’s First Play

The Irish experimental theater company Dead Centre is taking a wrecking ball to Chekhov’s unwieldy five-hour play Platonov (also known as Untitled Play) with its new metatheatrical work, Chekhov’s First Play. Devised and directed by Bush Moukarzel and Ben Kidd, this 70-minute production is a radical reworking of the original four-act drama, playfully magnifying its follies and the overreach of its young playwright, who penned it before he was 20.

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