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Niagara on the Lake, Ontario, Canada
My virtue is that I say what I think, my vice that what I think doesn't amount to much.

Thursday, January 10, 2019

How Do You Set James Joyce's Most Famous Story on the Stage?


The Dead is one of my favourite stories. If I'd heard about this production earlier I would have been tempted to break my US boycott (and my bank account). It sounds like a fabulous theatre experience.
"It’s a touch ironic that the central hook of The Dead, 1904, an immersive theatrical adaptation of James Joyce’s short story “The Dead,” is a lavish holiday feast. Performed at the wonderfully festive and stately Irish Historical Society on New York’s Upper East Side, The Dead, 1904 invites its audience to sit around the table with Joyce’s Morkan women and their dinner guests to partake in their annual Feast of the Epiphany. It’s January 6, 1904, the snow is falling, candles are lit, stout and sherry poured—and the table is set with steaming tureens heaped with potatoes, cranberry sauce, and winter oranges for an intimate audience of 52. The source of this irony lies in the tension between the very act of feasting and the unnamed specter looming between the lines of Joyce’s most famous short story: Ireland’s Great Famine."
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