Brilliantly Entertaining Irish Hit Play Is Wexner Center Season Highlight

“As brilliant an original play as you are likely to see in the theater this year“—New York Sun

Internationally acclaimed Galway-based theater group Druid Ireland makes its local debut with Enda Walsh’s The Walworth Farce, presented by the Wexner Center at the Thurber Theatre on OSU’s campus Friday and Saturday, October 16-17 at 8 pm. The production revels in Walsh’s sparkling command of language and the hilarious twists and turns of his freewheeling play-within-a-play plot.

Presented as an old-fashioned high farce—complete with rapid costume changes, cross-dressing, and mistaken identity—the production combines hilarious moments with jolts of dark realism, delivering insights into what happens when human beings become stuck in the stories that they invent about themselves. 

EVENT INFORMATION: Druid Ireland presents the theater production The Walworth Farce (120 mins., including intermission) Friday and Saturday October 16–17 at 8 pm in Thurber Theatre at the Drake Center, 1849 Cannon Drive. Run time: Tickets are $24 for the general public, $20 for members, and $10 for students. For tickets, call (614) 292-3535, or visit wexarts.org or ticketmaster.com.

The show revolves around the lives of a father and his two grown sons who have relocated from Ireland to a shabby tenement flat on the Walworth Road in London. Each day, the father—an amateur playwright with one play to his credit—orchestrates a front room enactment of his play (the play of their lives) that shakily depends on his slippery selective memory. This must-see show of the Wexner Center’s theater season has been consistently hailed by critics as a sensation and prompted such enthusiastic comments as "ferociously entertaining...a triumph of suspense and staging, enacted unforgettably" (New York Times); "a most original talent...swaggers with vitality" (Guardian); and "a theatrical experience that claws at the imagination for days afterwards" (Variety).

While at the Wexner Center, members of Druid Ireland will meet with students from Ohio State’s Department of Theatre to discuss the work of playwright Enda Walsh and Druid's strong history of collaboration with Irish writers. This session will allow students to hear firsthand about the process of developing The Walworth Farce.

 

EVENT AND SEASON SUPPORT

 

Presented in association with David Eden Productions, Ltd

Major support for the Wexner Center’s 2009–10 performing arts season is generously provided by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.

Accommodations provided by The Blackwell Inn.

All performing arts programs and events also receive support from the Corporate Annual Fund of the Wexner Center Foundation and Wexner Center members, as well as from the Greater Columbus Arts Council, The Columbus Foundation, Nationwide Foundation, and the Ohio Arts Council.

 

OTHER UPCOMING THEATER Tim Crouch’s ENGLAND November 17–18 at 8 pm, and November 19–20 at 9 pm, Wexner Center galleries Winner of a Fringe First Award at Edinburgh, England features two actors playing the same character: the somewhat naïve, disarmingly cheerful narrator who serves as a tour guide for a tale about art and family, whose deft turns contain dark surprises.