Druid Theatre’s ENDGAME and More Set for Irish Arts Center Fall 2025 Season
Season kicks off six-year partnership between IAC and the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), with the exhibition Patricia Hurl’s Irish Gothic.
By: Chloe Rabinowitz Jul. 23, 2025
Irish Arts Center has revealed its Fall 2025 season. Anchored by Druid Theatre’s celebrated production of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, and the return to New York of one of Ireland’s most legendary musicians (Andy Irvine), the season is a testament to IAC’s ever-expanding vision for its capacity as a presenting institution. Between a timelessly resonant work of theatre; a large scale exhibition beginning a six-year partnership with Ireland’s leading visual arts institution; a residency with Ireland’s national dance company; arresting concerts in a vast range of genres; and another year of the beloved weekend-long PoetryFest and other intimate literary gatherings; the season reflects contemporary Irish culture’s breadth. Here, its innovations live side by side, and often intertwined, with its rich legacies.
The season coincides with IAC embarking on Phase II of its stunning transformation—an endeavor to create an expansive hub to support the profound, porous, and ever-changing nature of Irish art and culture—which began with the opening of the new Irish Arts Center in 2021. Phase II of Irish Arts Center’s Capital Campaign involves renovating the Center’s historic home on 51st Street and bridging its past and future by joining it with the new Irish Arts Center on 11th Avenue—recapturing the intimacy of its old location with the flexibility and capability it has gained with the new. For Phase II, the organization resumes work with Davis Brody Bond, the lead architect for our 11th Avenue building, to complete the vision they began together more than a decade ago—with a space that will hold live music, literature and community events, artist residencies, and larger classes. As IAC doubles down on its simultaneous offering of experiences both epic and intimate, the season reveals the equal powers seeing one of the most lauded theatrical works of the 20th century in the vast, state-of-the-art JL Greene Theatre or catching the next major singer/songwriter while they’re still emerging, bearing their soul in the Devlin Café.
Irish Arts Center brings Druid Theatre’s production of Beckett’s Endgame, directed by Tony Award winner Garry Hynes, to New York audiences October 22–November 23. This engagement is part of the 50th anniversary year for the company. Endgame stars veteran Druid members Bosco Hogan, Aaron Monaghan, Rory Nolan, and Tony Award-winner Marie Mullen. The presentation continues Druid’s acclaimed legacy of touring to America, most notably with their Broadway production of Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane, for which Garry Hynes became the first woman to win the Tony for Best Director.
Garry Hynes’ new production follows her and Druid’s award-winning 2016 staging of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, which toured the world for three years. Celebrated by audiences and critics alike, it was hailed as “the freshest, funniest and most affecting production of the play in at least a quarter of a century” (The Irish Times).
As has been the case since the opening of the new Irish Arts Center, the organization’s multifaceted home has offered audiences various ways of encountering musical artists performing in a range of genres. In the JL Greene Theatre, Andy Irvine—a founder of Sweeney’s Men in the 1960s and Planxty in the 70s—makes his return to New York for the first time in nearly a decade (October 4–5). The recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award at the inaugural RTÉ Radio 1 Folk Awards in 2018, the multi-instrumentalist and vocalist’s repertoire ranges from traditional Irish music to Balkan folk dances to his own gripping songwriting—paralleling IAC’s own vision for considering Irish culture and tradition as part of a larger dialogue. In IAC’s cozy Devlin Café, three series offer audiences up-close engagements with gripping music: the Café Concert Series, featuring Northern Ireland Music Prize for Best Album-winning artist Joshua Burnside (November 10); Traditional Irish Sessions (September 19, October 17, December 12), led by IAC fiddle teacher James Cleveland; and Big City Folk Song Club (September 18, October 2, November 17), hosted by Irish songwriter Niall Connolly.
The season marks the momentous beginning of a partnership exemplifying IAC’s growing scope. The organization teams, across the next six years, with the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), Ireland’s leading visual arts institution, to present three exhibitions from IMMA’s permanent and special collections, beginning with celebrated artist Patricia Hurl’s Irish Gothic. Curated by Johanne Mullan in partnership with IMMA, Irish Gothic spans 40 years of Hurl’s painting, intensely focused on the lives of Irish women. Irish Gothic takes the form both, from September 5–28, of an installation in the organization’s theatre and, throughout the season from September 5–December 12, a building-wide exhibition.
In another collaboration with a pivotal Irish institution, IAC this season continues its dance residency partnership with Ireland’s new national dance company, Luail. This season’s cross-Atlantic residency activates archives across various organizations (Jacob’s Pillow in October, IAC in November, and the Irish World Academy at University of Limerick in December) through dance.
IAC’s literary programming has long explored the power of the written word brought into a site of performance, discussion, and community. The organization’s 16th annual PoetryFest, this year curated by esteemed Irish poet Vona Groarke (who co-curated with longtime organizer Nick Laird last year), brings audiences into close quarters with poets from Ireland, Northern Ireland, and North America, reading their stirring words (December 5–7). The lineup includes Rita Dove, Alan Gillis, Dorothea Lasky, Scott McKendry, Paul Muldoon, Pádraig Ó Tuama, m.s. RedCherries, Grace Wilentz, Christian Wiman, and Jenny Xie. In a special PoetryFest satellite event, William Keohane brings his hourlong performance Boxing Day (December 4) condensing his series of 52 box-shaped poems (each representing a week in the year) to IAC. Earlier in the season, Eimear McBride launches her work of “brilliantly rule-breaking fiction” (The Guardian), The City Changes Its Face, with a reading and conversation at IAC (September 18).
On November 7 at Pier 60, Irish Arts Center holds its 2026 Spirit of Ireland Gala, honoring five-time Emmy Award-winning (and 32-time nominee) comedian and podcast host Conan O’Brien as well as Robert A. Bradway, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Amgen, a worldwide pioneer in biotechnology, with Spirit of Ireland Awards, which IAC has conferred in recent years on luminaries including Meryl Streep, Stephen Colbert, and Ed SHeeran, to name a few. The event will also include special tributes to longtime IAC honorary chair Loretta Brennan Gluckman and virtuosic freestyle entertainer Kelley James, with a special performance by the revolutionary all-female Irish traditional supergroup BIIRD.
