UM Theatre & Dance's TRANSLATIONS Begins Tonight
The University of Montana will present Translations, a modern classic from one of Ireland's leading playwrights. Translations runs in the Masquer Theatre of the Performing Arts and Radio/Television Center on campus tonight, February 17-21 and February 24-28, 2015, and is being directed by Irish native Bernadette Sweeney.
This studio production of Friel's Translations integrates traditional Irish music into the play to evoke the world and era of the setting. Irish music is performed by members of the cast, four of whom are also working toward minors in Irish studies. Of the 12 talented performers, three play mandolin, one plays guitar, one the bodhran (the traditional Celtic frame drum), one the tin whistle, and all sing over the course of the play.
The play, first staged in Derry in 1980, is set in a Donegal hedge school in 1833, in the decade before the Great Famine. The play details the lives of the hedge schoolmaster and its pupils as occupying English soldiers begin to create an ordinance survey map of the area. Places and names are changed, Anglicized or eroded as a culture-and a people-struggle against imperial rule.
Sweeney holds a Ph.D. in Irish theatre and performance from Trinity College (Dublin). She worked as a professor of theatre at University College Cork before moving to Montana in 2008. She is author of Performing the Body in Irish Theatre (Palgrave MacMillan) and co-editor of The Theatre of Tom MacIntyre: 'Strays from the Ether' (Carysfort Press). Sweeney is associate professor of theatre history and performance studies at the University of Montana School of Theatre & Dance. She has also taught Irish drama for the UM Irish Studies program and other courses for the UM English Department. She is co-founder and first director of The Gathering: Collected Oral Histories of the Irish in Montana. An experienced actor and director, Sweeney directed Montana Repertory Theatre's 2014 national touring production of The Miracle Worker. She is married to Butte native Bryan Ferriter; they have two daughters, Ruby and Saoirse.
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