AUDITION
Dancing at Lughnasa
By Brian Friel
Directed by Barry Wallace
Show Dates:
January 12th-26th, 2025
Audition Dates:
- Saturday, November 16th at 6:00 pm
- Sunday, November 17th at 2:00 pm
This extraordinary play is the story of five unmarried sisters eking out their lives in a small village in Ireland in 1936. We meet them at the time of the festival of Lughnasa, which celebrates the pagan god of the harvest with drunken revelry and dancing. Their spare existence is interrupted by brief, colorful bursts of music from the radio, their only link to the romance and hope of the world at large. The action of the play is told through the memory of the illegitimate son of one of the sisters as he remembers the five women who raised him: his mother and four maiden aunts. He is only seven in 1936, the year his elderly uncle, a priest, returns after serving for twenty-five years as a missionary in a Ugandan leper colony. For the young boy, two other disturbances occur that summer. The sisters acquire their first radio, whose music transforms them from correct Catholic women to shrieking, stomping banshees in their own kitchen. And he meets his father for the first time, a charming Welsh drifter who strolls up the lane and sweeps his mother away in an elegant dance across the fields. From these small events spring the cracks that destroy the foundation of the family forever. Widely regarded as Brian Friel’s masterpiece, this haunting play is Friel’s tribute to the spirit and valor of the past.
Winner of the 1992 Tony Award® for Best Play.
Winner of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play and the Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Broadway Play and.
Chosen by Time magazine as one of the ten best plays for 1991, saying it is, “The most elegant and rueful memory play since The Glass Menagerie.”
“…this play does exactly what theater was born to do, carrying both its characters and audience aloft on those waves of distant music and ecstatic release that, in defiance of all language and logic, let us dance and dream just before night must fall.” —The New York Times.
“This is no way a play to be missed—simply a wondrous experience. Experience it.” —New York Post.
Audition Requirements
- No monologue is necessary. The audition will consist of cold readings from the script.
- A headshot and resume are recommended but not required.
- Please bring a detailed list of conflicts for the next 3 months.
Roles
Available roles: 5 female, 3 male
A note about accents: The entire show is set in rural Ireland (village of
Ballybeg, County Donegal) in 1936. If you think you can do an Irish accent,
try it! Otherwise audition with the best character interpretation you can
give, regardless of accent.
- Michael: A young man in his 20’s/30’s and narrator. He also speaks lines
of “the boy,” who is Michael when he was 7. As a child, Michael is seen as
being surrounded by love. As narrator he not only dictates the action but
reveals the futures of the other characters. - Kate Mundy (40): Schoolteacher, breadwinner and the oldest of the
Mundy sisters. Behaves as a mother figure and authority in the household. - Maggie Mundy (38): Housekeeper for the family. Generally warm, she
keeps things going in the house not only literally (cooking, cleaning etc.)
but figuratively with her jokes that often help “defuse tensions.” - Agnes Mundy (35): Knits gloves in the home for money and also helps
with household chores. Quiet and contemplative, she has taken on the
special role of protector for Rose. - Rose Mundy (32): Also knits with Agnes for income. Rose acts much
younger than her age due to a developmental disability, but she sees the
world through a different and unique filter. - Christina (Chris) Mundy (26): Michael's mother and with no paid job. Struggles with being in love with Gerry who waffles in her commitment to her. She is sometimes defensive about her sisters’ help to care for Michael.
- Gerry Evans (33): Michael’s father and Chris’ on-and-off-again boyfriend. He is generally charming and affectionate towards Chris, but is a free-spirited adventurer and entrepreneur who generally does what he pleases.
- Father Jack Mundy (53): Missionary priest, older brother to the sisters
and uncle to Michael. Father Jack recently returned after many years of
living in a leper colony in Uganda. He is ill with malaria and has difficulty
with his memory, He appears to have embraced pagan beliefs and lost his
Catholic faith.
This project is being supported in whole or in part, by federal award number 21.027 awarded to the City of Knoxville by the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the Arts & Culture Alliance