Who: Geraldine Hughes
What: Livestream of prerecorded final performance of Belfast Blues
Where: Irish Rep online
When: September 22-27, suggested donation $25
Why: Born in Belfast and based in New York, Irish actress and playwright Geraldine Hughes has appeared in such films as Rocky Balboa and Killing Lincoln, such television series as Law & Order SVU and The Blacklist, and such Broadway hits as Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and Jerusalem. But she’s most well known for Belfast Blues, her autobiographical one-woman show about her childhood growing up during the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the 1980s. She first performed the play, in which she portrays twenty-four characters, in 2003 and has since taken it all over the world. She retired the play after a 2019 run back at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast, but that grand finale, held as part of West Belfast’s Féile an Phobail (Festival of the People) and directed by actress Carol Kane, was recorded for posterity and will be livestreamed by the Irish Rep in its continuing innovative online programming during the pandemic. “There’s no audience better than a Belfast audience!” Hughes said upon reviving the seventy-five-minute show one last time at the Lyric. “I’m so excited to share the story of Belfast Blues with a new generation of theatergoers and eager to retell it to all those who are returning! The support from home is truly incomparable!”
The Irish Rep has previously staged the intimate, moving The Gifts You Gave to the Dark, a spectacular online iteration of The Weir, Aedin Moloney’s sexy one-woman show Yes! Reflections of Molly Bloom, and other presentations, making it one of the busiest theater companies during the pandemic, and one of the most successful when it comes to adapting to online viewing. Tickets are free, but there is a suggested donation of $25. Next up for the company is Give Me Your Hand (a poetic stroll through the National Gallery of London) October 13-18, Eugene O’Neill’s A Touch of the Poet October 27 to November 1, and the two-part A Beggar Upon Horseback with John Douglas Thompson as Frederick Douglass on November 9 and A Beggar on Foot on November 10.