Irish Arts Center Presents US Premiere of THE WHISTLING GIRL this Month

Irish Arts Center is set to present The Whistling Girl, the U.S. premiere of the collaboration between Dublin-based composer/keyboardist Trevor Knight and jazz singer/actor Honor Heffernan that sets the fabulously mordant words of 20th Century poet/critic/playwright/screenwriter/New York legend Dorothy Parker to song.

Embracing dirty-cabaret, electronic-vaudeville, rock, and jazz, Knight's arrangements lend a vital theatricality to Parker's sardonic verse. He, Heffernan, and their full band (Tom Jamieson on drums, Garvan Gallagher on bass, and Ed Deane on guitar) channel the spirit of an American literary icon during Parker's years of notoriety in New York. The event is presented in association with the Dorothy Parker Society.

Parker was born in 1893 New York, and, after enduring a tumultuous childhood, learned to weave the bitterness of life's misfortunes into witty poetry, publishing her first work with Vanity Fair in her early 20s. She quickly immersed herself in New York media, becoming New York's only female theater critic. Her fast rise was coupled with her involvement as a central member of the infamous Algonquin Round Table writers' group, aka the "Vicious Circle" of writers that included Harold Ross, George S. Kaufman, Robert Benchley, Robert E. Sherwood, and on-again-off-again members like Tallulah Bankhead, Noël Coward, Harpo Marx, and Peggy Wood. Among this powerful group of wordsmiths and thespians, Parker stood out as a prolific poet (publishing over 300 works in the 1920s alone) and unfettered wit.

The music Knight composed for The Whistling Girl, per Jackie Hayden's review in Hot Press Magazine, "echoes of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weil, as well as some of the keyboard flourishes familiar to fans of Ray Manzarek of The Doors, a touch of Kraftwerk here, and Mark Knopfler there and Leonard Cohen somewhere else. That musical approach chime[s] well with a woman very much ahead of her time, as if the world [were] finally catching up."

Parker's incisive spirit-and her fearlessness in critiquing what she wanted when she wanted, regardless of backwards social mores-is embodied in Knight and Heffernan's song cycle. So too is the fact that her intellectually driven and thereby mythologized social life was also paired with both personal turmoil-depression, alcoholism, suicide attempts, political scapegoating during the McCarthy Era-and the persistent urge, despite these immense setbacks, to fight various forms of injustice. (She helped found the Hollywood Anti-N*zi League, supported children in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, and left her literary estate to the NAACP.) "Everything she is saying is just as relevant today as when she wrote [it]," Heffernan told the Galway Advertiser. "We've called the show The Whistling Girl, which is one of her poems. It was a derogatory term for women who whistled or were badly-behaved, so the title plays on the quirkiness of Parker's nature."

This event will take place on November 17 and 18 at 8pm at Irish Arts Center (553 West 51st Street). General tickets are $28 for non-members and $23 for members, while premium tickets are $34 for non-members and $28 for members; they can be purchased at 866-811-4111 or irishartscenter.org.

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