James Joyce’s novella, “The Dead,” describes a holiday gathering on January 6,1904, the Feast of the Epiphany, in the Dublin home of two elderly sisters, Kate and Julia Morkan, and their niece, Mary Jane. At the party are students, friends, a celebrated tenor, a lost alcoholic, and the couple, Gabriel and Gretta Conroy. Over the course of an evening, there are conversations, music, dancing and dining. There are speeches and disagreements – polite and impolite – and when it is all over Gabriel learns something about his wife that changes his sense of who she is and who they are to each other, of what it actually means to be alive, and to be dead.

This exquisite theatrical recreation of James Joyce’s haunting story was the most sought-after theater event of New York’s 2016 holiday season and we relish to opportunity to welcome you again, or for the first time.

What could be more festive than a Christmas feast among the dead? In “The Dead,” the concluding tale in James Joyce’s 1914 short story collection, Dubliners, the seminal modernist paints the attendees of the Morkan sisters’ annual Feast of the Epiphany celebration in painstaking detail. Playwrights The Dead, 1904, now in its second annual run at the American Irish Historical Society. It’s a sumptuous, immersive evening — made all the more so, if you get lucky like I did, by the snow that blanketed the Upper East Side — featuring singing, dancing, a sit-down dinner amongst the cast, and plenty of port and Guinness to go around. James Russell plays Freddy Malins, a perpetually drunk young man, who, as expected, shows up “screwed,” with no plans of sobering up. He chatted with StageBuddy about working with the Irish Rep, adapting to immersive theatre, and why you might want to pass on that third glass of sherry. So first things first, how did you get involved with the project? I’ve been working with the Irish Rep for the past five years now, and I’ve worked basically every fall in a production with them, mostly with Ciarán O’Reilly as the director. Last year, Ciarán reached out to me …Read more