Fourteenth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

When the pandemic began, many theaters moved their content into the online realm, maintaining a connection to audiences by broadcasting filmed versions of earlier productions while postponing new work. Ireland’s national theater, the Abbey, took a different approach, seeking instead to engage Irish artists and Irish audiences (both broadly defined) in an act of co-creation framed as a “national conversation” about what happens next. But the “Dear Ireland” project also had an economic motivation: commissioning new work meant employment, even if temporary, for theater professionals set adrift by lockdown. The series of fictional monologues, and, later, staged readings of letters solicited from the public, represents a unique response to a moment that has made traditional live theater impossible, and it raises important questions about the economic impact of arts organizations and the responsibility of a national theater to help coalesce a national public. Only a few years previously, the Abbey’s directors had suffered the ire of Irish theater professionals over a programming strategy that made the Theatre flush but left many Irish-based practitioners un- or under-employed, in part because of a globalizing impulse in programming decisions. This paper assesses how “Dear Ireland,” a specific response to the COVID moment, materialized from this ongoing debate about the responsibility of the national theater as an institution to the imaginative life and the material welfare of “Ireland” as an evolving entity in the global picture.