Buck Creek Players Continue 35th Anniversary Season with Dancing at Lughnasa March 13-21

The Buck Creek Players will continue their 35th Anniversary "Award-Winning Season" with Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa, winner of the 1992 Tony Award® for Best Play. Performances will be held at 8:00 p.m. on March 13, 14, 20 and 21, with 2:30 p.m. matinees on March 14, 15, 20 and 21. All performances will be held at the Buck Creek Playhouse, 11150 Southeastern Avenue. Tickets are $14 for adults and $12 for students and senior citizens aged 62 or older and can be reserved by calling (317) 862-2270. Group discounts are available for parties of ten or more.

Set in the 1930's, Dancing at Lughnasa focuses on five unmarried sisters living together in the Irish countryside. The household is made up of the imperious teacher Kate (Melissa DeVito), the irreverent Maggie (Christy Walker), the serene and steady Agnes (Lucy Fields), the sweetly eccentric Rose (Sonja Schoene), and the romantic Chris (Rebecca Wolfe), who has given birth to an illegitimate son, Michael (Brian Boyd). The women cling to their knitting needles and the radio, from which music enters the house to distract them from the inevitable change that has begun to overwhelm the simple pleasures and traditions of their village life. Young Michael cleaves to his kite, as his absentee father, Gerry (Ian Walker), unexpectedly arrives on his motorcycle to stir the sisters' fires of passion. Meanwhile, the sisters' older brother, Jack (Jim Thorp), returns home from 25 years of missionary work, ill and disoriented, forgetting his sisters' names and further layering the play's themes of memory and forgetting.

The Lughnasa festival of light and rebirth provides the play's offstage backdrop and stirs up the conflict of pagan and Christian cultures. One by one, the sisters submit to the lure of the earth, dancing like dervishes, remembering pilgrimages to past dances and their lost innocence. Michael is the silent witness who will tell their story in its context of personal, cultural, emotional, and economic change.

The director of Dancing at Lughnasa is Lea Viney, returning to direct at the playhouse after previously volunteering in the same capacity for past productions of Hide and Seek, The Haunting of Hill House, and The Deer and the Antelope Play. Joining Viney on the production team are Gloria Bray (Producer), Linda Rowand (Costumer), Don Drennen (Lighting and Sound Designer), Patrick Banks (Stage Manager), Brian G. Hartz (Dialect Coach) and Ruthie Weller-Passman (Assistant Director). Viney also designed the set and serves as Technical Director.

For more information or directions to the playhouse, please visit the theater's website at www.buckcreekplayers.com.

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