You can warm up your winter with an Irish love story when the Peterborough Theatre Guild presents its production of John Patrick Shanley’s Outside Mullingar, running for 10 performances from January 24 to February 8.
Set in rural Ireland, the play tells the story of middle-aged neighbouring farmers Anthony Reilly and Rosemary Muldoon.
Rosemary has been romantically interested in Anthony her entire life, but the painfully shy Anthony is unaware of Rosemary’s feelings and, what’s more, he dislikes farming. When his father threatens to disinherit him and leave the family farm to a nephew instead, Rosemary steps into the middle of a land feud and family eccentricities to fight against time and mortality in hopes of securing her dream of love.
Even if you aren’t familiar with the play, you have probably heard of John Patrick Shanley. The Irish-American playwright, screenwriter, and director wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay for the 1987 film Moonstruck starring Cher and Nicolas Cage. He also wrote the play Doubt: A Parable, which won the Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 2005 and was made into a 2008 film starring Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman, which Shanley also wrote and directed.
Despite his Irish roots, Shanley never wanted to write about the Irish, as he recounted in his January 2014 essay published in the New York Times just prior to the Broadway premiere of Outside Mullingar.
“I didn’t want to be labelled an Irish-American writer,” he said. “I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to write about everybody. And for the next 30 years I did.”
That all changed when Shanley turned 43, and his elderly father asked him to take him home to Ireland.
“I always knew I’d have to come home eventually. I’m Irish as hell: Kelly on one side, Shanley on the other. My father had been born on a farm in the Irish Midlands. He and his brothers had been shepherds there, cattle and sheep, back in the early 1920s. I grew up surrounded by brogues and Irish music, but stayed away from the old country till I was over 40. I just couldn’t own being Irish.”
“When I sat with my father in that farm kitchen, the one that he had grown up in, and listened to my Irish family talk, I recognized that this was my Atlantis, the lost and beautiful world of my poet’s heart. There was no way to write about the farm, yet I had to write about it. I listened to the amazing language these folks were speaking as if it were normal conversation, and I knew this was my territory. But it was new to me. It was a time to listen, not to write.”
It took almost another two decades before Shanley decided it was finally time to write about the farm, but only after a creative crisis. When he turned 60, Shanley says he “flipped out” and “felt I had nothing left to say or do” — a feeling he grappled with for a year.
“One quiet day, I sat down without a thought in my head and wrote a play about the farm,” he said, noting that he wanted to write a love story.
That love story, set on a farm outside the Irish town of Mullingar, he called Outside Mullingar (“a prosaic title, perhaps to balance the poetry it contained”).
The play premiered on Broadway at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre in a Manhattan Theatre Club production in January 2014, and was subsequently nominated for a Tony Award, two Outer Critics Circle Awards, and a Drama Desk Award. Shanley later wrote and directed the 2020 film adaptation called Wild Mountain Thyme, starring Jamie Dornan and Emily Blunt as Anthony and Rosemary.
The Peterborough Theatre Guild production of Outside Mullingar, directed by Jerry Allen and produced by Pat Hooper and Bob Campbell, stars Steve Foote as Anthony Reilly, Nancy Towns as Rosemary Muldoon, Luke Foster as Anthony’s widowed father Tony, and Mary Delaney as Rosemary’s recently widowed mother Aoife.
The play will be performed at the Guild Hall at 364 Rogers Street in Peterborough’s East City, with evening performances at 7:30 p.m. on January 24 and 25, January 30 to February 1, and February 6 to 8, with Sunday matinee performances at 2 p.m. on January 26 and February 2.
Assigned seating tickets are priced at $30 for adults, $27 for seniors, and $20 for students and can be purchased by calling 705-745-4211 or online at www.peterboroughtheatreguild.com.
