Dancing at Lughnasa at Kordazone Theatre

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.

Widely regarded as Brian Friel’s masterpiece, this haunting play is Friel’s tribute to the spirit and valor of the past. The play won the 1992 Tony Award® for Best Play, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play, the Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Broadway Play, and was chosen by TIME Magazine as one of the ten best plays for 1991. DANCING AT LUGHNASA was selected as part of Korda’s second public call for production proposals and will be directed by Dean Valentino, who most recently directed 2025’s Murder on the Orient Express at Korda.