Due to the COVID-19 Pandemic this event has been cancelled. We hope to remount this event in September. Please check back here for updates. Thank you!

 

Renowned Irish actor, Ray Yeates, brings his critically acclaimed one man show to MIlwaukee as part of an American tour.

A story of love, family, friendship, turbulent economic times… and Thierry Henry’s left hand!

Where were you when Ireland’s World Cup 2010 dreams were dashed? Eoin was actually there, at the heart of the drama in the Stade de France on Nov 18th 2009. After emigrating to Germany to find work during the 80’s, Eoin made a new life for himself with the help of his wife Frieda and son Dieter. Now he returns to an Ireland that has boomed and bust to be reunited with best friends Mick and Shane, the three amigos, on that fateful night in Paris.

THE PARTING GLASS first premiered in Ireland in 2010. This production has since toured to Off- Broadway in New York twice, Paris, Liverpool, London, Sweden and two Irish National tours. It has received 4 star reviews from every national newspaper and has enjoyed standing ovations all over Ireland, New York and in France, Germany, Sweden and the U.K.

“The play makes a variegated and eloquent comment on maleness, friendship and fatherhood, and every Eoin and his son should see it.” The Irish Times

“Yeates, thanks to excellent comic timing, mimes the laughter from Bolger’s script to take us beyond anger, without making us forget it.” Irish Examiner

“. . . the layers of Bolger’s text balance the polemical with the personal, skirting sentimentality. Ray Yeates’s versatile performance carries the audience with him.” The Guardian

“No matter what stage of life you are in or what nationality you are – or how you feel about football – THE PARTING GLASS will resonate with you. This is the sort of work that cuts through to the heart of human experience, across all boundaries.” nytheatre.com

“A fascinating monologue about emigration and the meaning of home, as well as family, loss and friendship… played brilliantly by Ray Yeates, with genuine warmth and feeling”. Real Time Arts Magazine

There are two performances:

• • Friday, March 27, 7:30 PM
  • Saturday, March 28, 7:30 PM

They will be at Celtic MKE, 1532 N Wauwatosa Ave, Wauwatosa, WI 53213.

Parking is available nearby and bear and wine can be purchased. The Village of Wauwatosa with its numerous dining options is two block south of the center.

Dermot Bolger, the author, had this to say about “The Parting Glass”:

“Bill Shankly famously remarked that football was not a matter of life and death: it was more important. I think he meant that great sporting moments – like moments of great passion or great art – manage to briefly suspend life and death; they make us forget our everyday concerns and become caught up in a drama where, in that moment, quite literally nothing else exists.

Thierry Henry’s deliberate handball – which cheated Ireland out of a place in the 2010 World Cup finals – was a moment when almost every Irish person (in Ireland or abroad) shared a collective experience. We may not have all found Jesus in that moment, but he certainly got mentioned a lot in dispatches.

But if Irish people were left with a sense of feeling cheated, then Thierry Henry was only a bit player in the collective sense that we have been massively robbed: robbed of jobs, robbed of hope, robbed of our children’s future by a self-regulated elite of bankers, developers and politicians. And not only robbed, but herded into a collective hysteria where people were panicked into buying over-priced property in a suburban sprawl that started in Dublin and ended with apartments perched on stilts in Galway Bay.

In a 1990 play, In ‘High Germany’, for the Gate Theatre, I used the metaphor of football to explore the lives of three economic migrants forced to leave Ireland. Set in Germany during Euro ‘88 (where they share a terrace for the last time) it was narrated by Eoin; a twenty- nine-year-old Irishman who – after Ireland are knocked out by a dodgy Dutch goal – finds himself returning not to his old life in Ireland but to a new life in Hamburg, with a son about to grow up with Irish cheekbones and a Germany accent, bewildered by his father’s life.

Patrick Kavanagh once noted the observation of Marcus Aurelius that, while he grew old, the people on the Appian Way remained the same pleasant age of twenty-four on average. Playwrights likewise occasionally despair that, while they go prematurely bald, their earlier alter-egos on stage are played by a succession of young men who never seem to age.

Now twenty years on, I have rescued Eoin from the limbo of eternally being twenty-nine and allowed his heart to be broken anew by the cheating hand of Thierry Henry in this play that explores the past two decades of his life and his son’s life in the context of the social changes in Ireland in that time.

He is suddenly as old as his author, though thankfully not as follicly challenged. He may be fictional, but he is facing the questions that are now confronting every parent in Ireland.”

 

Ray Yeates  began directing and acting at UCD in the late 70’s. He started directing at the Abbey Theatre in 1983 and was appointed Deputy Artistic Director in 1985 at the age of 24. He emigrated to New York in 1992 where he was a resident teacher at The IAC and The American Academy of Dramatic Art. He was Artistic Director of The Shades of Green Arts Festival in the Bronx. He returned to acting in New York performing Dermot Bolger’s ‘In High Germany’ and in The Steppenwolf/Long Wharf production of ‘The Playboy of Western World’. With axis Ray has toured to the US, the UK, Belgium, Poland and around Ireland. Ray is also creative director of ‘Hip-Nós’, a groundbreaking collaboration between Sean-Nós and Hip-Hop artists. In June 2008 Ray was awarded ‘Best Arts Champion’ at the Allianz Business to Arts Awards. In August 2011 he was appointed City Arts Officer for Dublin City Council. He is responsible to Dublin City Council for the development of the Arts in Dublin including The International Literature Festival Dublin. Culture Night MusicTown and the Dublin Chinese New Year Festival. He continues to perform The Parting Glass internationally and the play has toured to Sweden Hamburg Liverpool Paris and Buenos Aires.