Prep School: DruidO’Casey

Druid Theatre staging Sean O’Casey’s Dublin Trilogy – directed by Tony Award-winner Garry Hynes, and marking the 100 anniversary of the first play in the cycle, The Shadow of a Gunman – is an exponentially exciting event. Either Druid or O’Casey would be incredible to have on the NYU Skirball stage, and so the confluence of both in the form of DruidO’Casey will be a monumental experience. Get ready for this marathon trilogy with some insight into both Sean O’Casey as a playwright and Druid as a company.

Sean O’Casey (1880-1964) is a renowned Irish playwright who brought the Irish working class to the popular stage, grounding his work in the real political and social upheavals of the time. A 1959 New Yorker review extols O’Casey’s genius: “A masterpiece is a work to which nothing can be added without redundancy and from which nothing can be taken away without loss. In this category Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock securely belongs.” Read a brief bio of O’Casey – and some context on the premier, and subsequent riots, of The Plough and the Stars – via Yale’s Modernism Lab.

Druid was founded in 1975 in Dublin, and now tours internationally –  “anchored in the West of Ireland and looking to the world.” Learn more about the company, their past and current works, cultural programs, and more.

Recommended readings to get you in gear for the show.

Susan Cannon Harris, Irish Drama and the Other Revolutions: Playwrights, Sexual Politics and the International Left, 1892-1964. Edinburgh University Press, 2022. 

James Moran, The Theatre of Sean O’Casey. Methuen Drama, 2013.

Christopher Murray, Sean O’Casey: Writer at Work: A Biography. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004.

Fintan O’Toole, Critical Moments: Fintan O’Toole on Modern Irish Theatre. Carysfort Press, 2003.

Anthony Roche, The Irish Dramatic Revival, 1899-1939. Bloomsbury, 2015.

Press from O’Casey’s lifetime, and contextualizing the Dublin Trilogy in different historical moments (including the audience riots at the premier of The Plough and the Stars).

If you find yourself longing to spend more time with O’Casey after these marathon performances, follow that interest into the archives. O’Casey’s papers are held in libraries and archives all over the US, Ireland and the UK – including decades of correspondence from O’Casey to NYU Professor David H. Greene at NYU’s Fales Library and Special Collections, and a collection of papers at the New York Public Library.

This notebook, labeled “Ideas for Plays and Stories,” was featured as part of a 1977 NYPL exhibit “Self-Explorations: Diarists in England and America” – along with diaries and notebooks from Virginia Woolf, Charles Dickens and George Eliot.

O’Casey’s own home library was cataloged relatively recently by the National Library of Ireland – read this first-hand account from a student who worked on the project, including a tour through some notable titles and ephemera.