Theatre Production – Riders to the Sea

October 8-10, Show times at 6:30 pm and 8 pm

All performances will be held in the Parker Theatre. This fall we are limiting our audience to 50 per performance.

Cost for each performances is $5 per person. Faculty, Staff and students receive one free ticket. Call the box office at 573-629-3182 to make a reservation and pay at the door – cash or check only. We will not offer online ticket sales for the one acts and audience members. Running time for these productions will range from 40- 60 minutes with no intermission.

Riders to the Sea is a play written by Irish Literary Renaissance playwright John Millington Synge. It was first performed on 25 February 1904 at the Molesworth Hall, Dublin, by the Irish National Theater Society with Helen Laird playing Maurya. A one-act tragedy, the play is set in the Aran Islands, Inishmaan, and like all of Synge’s plays it is noted for capturing the poetic dialogue of rural Ireland. The plot is based not on the traditional conflict of human wills but on the hopeless struggle of a people against the impersonal but relentless cruelty of the sea.

Background – In 1897, J. M. Synge was encouraged by his friend and colleague William Butler Yeats to visit the Aran Islands. He went on to spend the summers from 1898 to 1903 there. While on the Aran island of Inishmaan, Synge heard the story of a man from Inishmaan whose body washed up on the shore of an island of County Donegal, which inspired Riders to the Sea.

Riders to the Sea is written in the Hiberno-English dialect of the Aran Islands. Synge’s use of the native Irish language is part of the Irish Literary Revival, a period when Irish literature looked to encourage pride and nationalism in Ireland.