PICT's SHARON'S GRAVE, Great Irish Yarn About Love, Legends & the Land, Begins Tonight

July is peak vacation season, and for two hours, audiences can travel with PICT Classic Theatre to the wild southwest coast of Ireland. Sharon's Grave, by Irish audience-favorite John B. Keane, runs tonight, July 16, through August 1, in the Henry Heymann Theatre inside the Stephen Foster Memorial. The play is directed by Harvard-educated and award-winning Aoife Spillane-Hinks, who marries her penchant for creating thought-provoking theatre with Irish folklore, making this a play that has something for everyone.

"Keane is an extremely important playwright in Ireland," explains Sharon's Grave director Aoife Spillane-Hinks, "He is done in all of the major stages all over the country, but he is also done in the very vast and important community theatre scene over there ('amateur drama'), and that is where he was first embraced. He is from a town called Listowel, where he ran a pub. He was a pub owner, a playwright and a major fixture in the town."

Keane is loved for his portrayal of the superstitious, pagan-based ideals found in the more remote places in Ireland- an attitude that has mostly vanished with the coming of the modern age. He does this in Sharon's Grave by placing a mystical legend of his own creation at the center of the realistic story about a Kerry woman in 1925 who is trying desperately to hold onto her land after the death of her father.

"There is this mythic princess called Sharon with an evil handmaiden call Shíofra," says Spillane-Hinks about Keane's legend. "So basically, jealous Shíofra tricks Sharon into falling off of this cliff. As Sharon falls, she hangs onto Shíofra to save herself, and she pulls in Shíofra as well." Interestingly, you never meet these mythical figures in the play, yet the legend has a very strong influence on how the events of the story unfold.

"I think it is really exciting that we are able to bring this play to Pittsburgh to make the case for why it would be a good play to do in any country," expresses Spillane-Hinks, who first came to Pittsburgh in 2013 to direct PICT's production of Our Class. She then returned last season to direct Waiting for Godot, which was the runner-up for the Pittsburgh Post- Gazette's Play of the Year. PICT is delighted to welcome her back to direct Sharon's Grave, as her experience with Irish culture will make for a highly authentic portrayal of the script.

"My great-grandmother came over from County Kerry exactly 100 years ago, and she met my great-grandfather, another Irish immigrant from a nearby village, in Boston," revealed Spillane-Hinks, whose Irish heritage has had an incredible impact on her life. Originally from Connecticut, Spillane-Hinks studied folklore and mythology at Harvard, received her Master's Degree at the National University of Ireland in Galway, and has been living in Dublin ever since, where she is the Co-Artistic Director of Then This Theatre.

"Sharon's Grave is like popular entertainment," says Spillane-Hinks. "It is rich and beautiful, but your average person would go see it, and they would love it because it is a great yarn. It is incredibly funny. It is dark and a little bit horrifying. And at the center of all of it is this gorgeous love story in a wild world of myth, of family wars, and of huge hungers waiting to be satisfied."

PICT Classic Theatre is committed to the creation of high-quality, professional thought-provoking theatre of substance. We accomplish this mission by investing in and promoting the community and region, and by producing and presenting classics and the "modern" classics of Irish and world theatre. We continue to explore innovative ideas that showcase the emotional power of a play and its ability to stir the soul in unimaginable ways.

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