PLAY GUIDE 2017 2018 About ATC …………………………………………………………………………………..… 1 Introduction to the Play ………………………………………………………………………... 2 Meet the Playwright ……………………………..…………………………………………….. 2 Meet the Characters ……………………………………………….……………………..…… 3 Historical Context: Two Generations ……..……………………………………………………… 4 References in the Play ………….……………………………………………………………… 5 Geography of Ireland ………..…………………………………………………………………. 7 Glossary ……………………………………………………………………………………… 8 Discussion Questions & Activities ………………………………………………………………. 11 Outside Mullingar Play Guide by Katherine Monberg, with contributions from ATC Learning & Education staff. SUPPORT FOR ATC’S LEARNING & EDUCATION PROGRAMMING HAS BEEN PROVIDED BY: APS Rosemont Copper Arizona Commission on the Arts Stonewall Foundation Bank of America Foundation Target Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona The Boeing Company City of Glendale The Donald Pitt Family Foundation Community Foundation for Southern Arizona The Johnson Family Foundation, Inc. Cox Charities The Lovell Foundation Downtown Tucson Partnership The Marshall Foundation Enterprise Holdings Foundation The Maurice and Meta Gross Foundation Ford Motor Company Fund The Max and Victoria Dreyfus Foundation Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Foundation The Stocker Foundation JPMorgan Chase The WIlliam L. and Ruth T. Pendleton Memorial Fund John and Helen Murphy Foundation Tucson Medical Center National Endowment for the Arts Tucson Pima Arts Council Phoenix Office of Arts and Culture Wells Fargo PICOR Charitable Foundation ABOUT ATC Under new leadership, and now celebrating its 51st season, Arizona Theatre Company boasts the largest subscriber base of any performing arts organization in Arizona, with more than 130,000 people each year attending performances at the historic Temple of Music and Art in Tucson, and the elegant Herberger Theater Center in downtown Phoenix. Each season of carefully selected productions reflects the rich variety of world drama – from classic to contemporary plays, from musicals to new works – as audiences enjoy a rich emotional experience that can only be captured through the power of live theatre. Touching lives through the power of theatre, ATC is the preeminent professional theatre in the state of Arizona. Under the direction of Artistic Director David Ivers in partnership with Managing Director Billy Russo, ATC operates in two cities – unlike any other League of Resident Theatres (LORT) company in the country. ATC shares the passion of the theatre through a wide array of outreach programs, educational opportunities, access initiatives, and community events. Through the schools and summer programs, ATC focuses on teaching Arizona’s youth about literacy, cultural development, performing arts, specialty techniques used onstage, and opens their minds to the creative power of dramatic literature. With approximately 450 Learning & Education activities annually, ATC reaches far beyond the metropolitan areas of Tucson and Phoenix, enriching the theatre learning experience for current and future audiences. Mr. Ivers and Mr. Russo continue to work on strategic planning, creative thinking, and adventurous programming all aimed at serving the current mission: To inspire, engage and entertain - one moment, one production and one audience at a time. The Temple of Music and Art, the home of ATC shows in downtown The Herberger Theater Center, ATC’s performance venue in downtown Tucson. Phoenix. 1 INTRODUCTION TO THE PLAY OUTSIDE MULLINGAR By John Patrick Shanley Directed by David Ivers *2017 Tony Award Nominee for Best Play* From the author of Doubt and Moonstruck comes this charmer of a romantic comedy set in the farmlands of Ireland. Anthony and Rosemary are two introverted Show art by Esser Design. misfits straddling 40. Anthony is painfully shy and has spent his entire life on a cattle farm in rural Ireland. Rosemary lives right next door and is determined to have him – at all costs! She has every reason to fear romantic catastrophe. But these yearning, Show art by Esser Design. eccentric souls fight their way towards solid ground and some kind of happiness. Poetic, uplifting, dark, and funny, Outside Mullingar is a compassionate work about how sometimes the very things we’re looking for happen to be right in front of us the whole time. MEET THE PLAYWRIGHT “John Patrick Shanley (Playwright) is from the Bronx. He was thrown out of St. Helena’s kindergarten. He was banned from St. Anthony’s hot lunch program for life. He was expelled from Cardinal Spellman High School. He was placed on academic probation by New York University and instructed to appear before a tribunal if he wished to return. When asked why he had been treated in this way by all these institutions, he burst into tears and said he had no idea. Then he went into the United States Marine Corps. He did fine. He’s still doing okay.” Such reads the official playwright biography of playwright John Patrick Shanley as provided by Dramatists Play Service, the publisher of Outside Mullingar. John Playwright John Patrick Shanley. Patrick Shanley was born in 1950, the youngest of five children who were raised Irish Catholic in the Bronx. His father was a meatpacker and his mother was a second- generation Irish immigrant in a historical and cultural atmosphere that was known for racism and anti-intellectualism, leading Shanley to get in fights throughout his childhood, though he asserted later in life that he rarely initiated the conflict. 2 Shanley attended the Cardinal Spellman High School for boys, where he spent sufficient time in after-school detention for the school to request his departure within two years. Shanley completed his education at the Thomas Moore school in New Hampshire, where he first began to engage his talent for writing and poetry. After graduation, Shanley attended NYU for a single unsuccessful semester, after which he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corp. Shanley served in the Vietnam War, after which he returned to NYU and graduated as valedictorian in 1977. Shanley then began to write plays, authoring more than a half dozen works by the early 1980s and receiving his first staged production for a collection of one-acts known as Welcome to the Moon in 1982. He worked a series of jobs during his early writing career, including working as an apartment painter, bartender, and elevator operator, until he received a generous NEA grant that allowed him to focus on writing full-time. His first screenplay, Moonstruck, was filmed by director Norman Jewison and starred well-known stars Cher and Nicholas Cage, earning Shanley the 1987 Academy Award for Best Screenplay. Shanley continued to write for Hollywood over the next few years, including screenplays for the films January Man, Joe Versus the Volcano (which Shanley also directed), Alive, and Congo, a retelling of a Michael Crichton bestselling novel. Shanley also remained active in the New York theater community, writing the stage plays Italian American Reconciliation, Beggars in the House of Plenty, Kissing Christine, Missing Marisa, and Where’s My Money, which became Shanley’s first involvement with the LAByrinth Theater Company in New York. Shanley’s films and plays were not particularly successful from a critical standpoint until his 2004 play, Doubt, which opened off- Broadway in November of 2004, receiving both the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play. He has currently authored more than 20 plays that have been performed around the world, and lives and writes in the Brooklyn Heights neighborhood of New York City. MEET THE CHARACTERS Actor John Hutton, who plays Tony Actor Larry Bull, who plays Anthony Actor Robynn Rodriguez, who plays Actor Cassandra Bissell, who plays Reilly in ATC’s production of Reilly in ATC’s production of Aoife Muldoon in ATC’s production Rosemary Muldoon in ATC’s Outside Mullingar. Outside Mullingar. of Outside Mullingar. p r o d u c t i o n o f O u t s i d e Mullingar. 3 Tony Reilly: A man of 75 or so in 2008, when the play begins. Anthony Reilly: Tony’s son, in his mid-forties and an intense dreamer. Aoife Muldoon: Tony and Anthony’s elderly neighbor, 70 years old, in somewhat bad health and mourning the recent loss of her husband, Christopher Muldoon. Rosemary Muldoon: Aoife’s daughter, in her mid-to-late 30s. HISTORICAL CONTEXT: TWO GENERATIONS Outside Mullingar portrays the world from the perceptions and memories of two generations: those of the elderly Tony Reilly and Aoife Muldoon, who are in their seventies during the late 2000s, and from the perspectives of their children, Anthony Reilly and Rosemary Muldoon, who are closer to 40 years old during the initial action of the play. Each generation’s respective perspective has been shaped by the different social, economic, and technological circumstances in which the characters grew up, came of age, and grew older. The Silent Generation The older generation of Tony and Aoife – members of the Traditionalist or Silent Generation – would have been born in Ireland around 1935, just over a decade after the partition of Ireland, the Irish War of Independence, and the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 that provided for the establishment of the Irish Free State (re-established as Ireland in 1937), while Northern Ireland exercised its option to remain as part of the United Kingdom. The world was also in the midst of a global depression that laid the foundation for the rise of fascism and communism in subsequent decades. Ireland in the 1930s was an impoverished country, with the majority of the population occupying small agricultural holdings. Emigration rates were high, particularly to England and the U.S., and difficult economic and living conditions among rural farmers sparked a trend toward urbanization that continued into the 1940s. Urban conditions remained difficult, with Dublin known as the site of some of the most notorious slums in Europe, which posed ongoing social and public health challenges. Ireland remained neutral in World War II, though the nation experienced food rationing and coal shortages induced by the global conflict between the Allied and Axis powers, during which time peat production became an economic priority in Ireland.