Immigration/Emigration
in Irish Literature/Theatre Panel #1
Diane
Hotten-Somers
Boston
College
hotten@bc.edu
“Immigrating and Assimilating Ireland’s Abbey Theatre Plays: Representations of the Irish on America’s Federal Theatre Project Stage”
When
the Irish emigrated to the United States, they continued what had become, after
the birth of the Abbey Theatre, the cultural practice of gathering in theatres
to connect with and celebrate their ancestral culture. The most concentrated
production of Irish plays in American history came between 1935-1939 when the
Federal Theatre Project (FTP), a subdivision of the WPA, produced over 3,050
performances of Irish plays. If American theatre ever looked, felt, and sounded
like Ireland, it was during the run of the FTP. And thus, through the FTP,
Irish immigrants experienced their homeland and reconnected with their cultural
identity. But, how
exactly did the FTP represent the Irish? Did they stay true to the Irish
cultural nationalism that the Abbey Theatre playwrights and plays meant to
express or did these plays undergo a similar assimilation process, one
experienced by most Irish immigrants, to make them palatable to an American
audience? My paper will investigate and discuss the FTP’s production of Irish
plays both to show the spectrum of representation(s) of the Irish on the
Federal Theatre stage and how these theatrical productions influenced Irish
immigrants‘ and Americans’ understanding of Irish identity.
Immigration/Emigration
in Irish Literature/Theatre Panel #1
Rosemary
E. Johnsen, Ph.D.
English
Department, Grand Valley State University
johnsenr@gvsu.edu
"Being Irish Somewhere
Else:
Deirdre Madden's
Interrogation of Irish Identity"
Award-winning novelist Deirdre Madden
is an important voice in Northern Irish writing, one whose work has been
praised by Seamus Heaney because it "always rings true." In her novels, Madden considers the
struggles of individuals to discern and achieve their identity in the context
of Irish emigration. Remembering
Light and Stone (1992) focuses on Aisling, a young Irish woman who has
spent most of her adult life in Europe, first France and then Italy. One by One in the Darkness (1996) is
set in Belfast and the Northern Irish countryside, and its main characters are
three sisters, Cate, Sally, and Helen Quinn. There is considerable conflict
between the two sisters who "stayed home" in N.I. and the glamorous
Cate, a London-based journalist.
When Deirdre Madden traces the pattern
of recent Irish-European history, she always links that history to the fate of
individual women. Being Irish in Europe
can clarify characters' sense of their identity, but it also provokes conflict
with their families. The emigration of
educated/professional Irish women to other European countries raises
significant questions about Irish identity, and Madden's novels suggest complex
answers to those questions.
Immigration/Emigration
in Irish Literature/Theatre Panel #1
Mary
Trotter
Indiana
University-Purdue University Indianapolis
matrotte@iupui.edu
This
paper explores how contemporary playwrights look at the Irish diaspora from a
more multivalent perspective than earlier Irish dramatists, better reflecting
the fluid boundary between Ireland and its diaspora communities. Dermot Bolger’s In High Germany shows
the experience of migrant workers in the European Union through the eyes of an
Irishman living in contemporary Germany.
In Ladies and Gentlemen Emma Donahue interrogates the performance
of class and sexual as well as national identity in her exploration of the
nineteenth-century marriage of Annie Hindle, male impersonator, and her Irish
dresser. And for the Irish émigré
living in early twentieth-century Ohio in Sebastian Barry’s White Woman
Street, Easter 1916 is nothing more than a headline read on a newspaper at
a whorehouse. By setting their works outside Ireland, and focusing on the range
of factors making up the emigrant’s hybrid identity, these playwrights blur the
boundary between the home space and the diasporic space, moving discussions of
Irish migration beyond the politically charged, yet limited, tropes from
earlier in the century, while still creating new historical and critical
perspectives on Irish identity, Irish emigration and the Irish diaspora.
Emigration/Immigration
in Irish Literature/Theatre Panel #2
Cheryl Herr
University of Iowa
Cheryl-herr@uiowa.edu
“The Aesthetics of Migration”
My paper looks at two depictions of modern Irish
migration history -- the first, John B. Keane's masterwork, The Bodhran
Makers (a story of the 1950s first published in 1985), and the second, the
award-winning 1993 short film, In Uncle Robert's Footsteps. Both works thematize the migrant’s exchange
of birth community for economic survival elsewhere. From this commonplace, what moves into the foreground of these
texts is not the personal trauma of relocation -- an issue of lost or
compromised identity -- but rather the phenomenology of social practices, both
old and new. My thesis is that
migration produces an aesthetic of the everyday, based in activities that,
without the migratory narrative frame, would be taken for granted. Indeed, migration itself comes into focus as
a social practice whose primary effect is to foreground the background.
Emigration/Immigration
in Irish Literature/Theatre Panel #2
Karin
Maresh
“Leaving is Not the Only
Answer:
Themes of Emigration in Tom
Murphy’s Plays”
Irish
playwright Tom Murphy lived the life of an emigrant in London during the late
1960s, where he felt out of his element and in limbo during his self-appointed
exile. That experience have shaped and
informed his plays which often paint a bleak picture of the constricting habits
of small-town Irish life, depicting characters caught between their dreams of
fortune and happiness and the harshness of reality. Murphy sees emigration as the solution for some of those
characters. Yet, in A Crucial Week
in the Life of a Grocer’s Assistant (1967; revised in 1969) and Conversations
on a Homecoming (1985), Murphy draws upon his own experience, suggesting
that emigration does not always bring with it the happiness and contentment
hoped for by the emigrant. By exploring
the reasons behind the decision to emigrate and the emotional consequences that
decision generates for the emigree and those left behind, Murphy presents
scenarios in which emigration is not the only, nor the right answer.
Emigration/Immigration
in Irish Literature/Theatre Panel #2
Thomas W. Zelman
College of St. Scholastica
tzelman@css.edu
BRIAN FRIEL'S UNHAPPY EMIGRANT"
Centering on Brian Friel's
most celebrated consideration of emigration, Philadelphia, Here I Come!
(1965), the paper examines the protagonist's tormented indecision as a
recasting of Telemachus's troubled search for his father in the Odyssey. First arguing that the Odyssean spirit is
essentially a longing for home, the paper goes on to regard Ballybeg as an
ironically depersonalized counterpart to Ithaca. In Philadelphia Friel restructures the Telemachus theme,
twisted so that Gar O'Donnell and his father, S.B., never achieve the sobbing
embraces of the Greek father and son.
In this reworking, Gar is incapable of recognizing his taciturn
and repressed father, who cloaks his emotions under mind-numbing conversation
about weather and hardware. In this
play and in others, Friel hints at the spiritual emptiness that the emigrant
will find in his new home and balances it against the elusiveness of any
domestic accord he will find in Ireland.
In other words, Friel offers a view of Ithaca, seen from Calypso's
island, complete with Penelope's well-entrenched suitors.