Three by Yeats: 3 short plays celebrating great Irish theatre & literature

Join us for an entertaining evening where we celebrate Irish culture, art, poetry, drama and music! Scena Theatre continues its 34th Season in Washington with "Three by Yeats" — a trio of plays by the great Irish writer, William Butler Yeats.

Get to know the works of Yeats who represents the finest drama and culture from Ireland. Scena Theatre has a rich history of staging Irish plays by many great writers featuring both local and global talent with authentic accents and characterizations. Our three plays include ...

"At the Hawk's Well" is a one-act play first performed in 1916. It is one of five plays by Yeats which are loosely based on the stories of Cuchulain the mythological hero of ancient Ulster. It was the first play written in English that employed many features of the Japanese Noh Theatre.

"The Death of Cuchulain" is a poem depicting a series of events that bring in Cuchulain’s wife, Emer, and son Finmole. Emer sends her son to confront and fight her husband after getting news that he is with another woman who is described as “young and sweet”. Purgatory is a drama by Yeats that was first presented in at the historic Abbey Theatre, Dublin in 1938, a few months before Yeats' death.

"Purgatory" is a drama that tells a family saga of decline and fall via an Old Man (the father) and a Boy (his 16-year-old son). It is set outside the former family home—which the Old Man's father had drunkenly burned down—leading him to K*ll his father as the building perished. The Boy is skeptical and repelled by the story of losing his own mother as she gave birth to him and the family’s subsequent decline.


Please join us for a magical night of theatre and culture as we transport you to old Ireland!

OPENING NIGHT / PRESS NIGHT IS FRIDAY MAY 12 at 7:30 PM

Host or Publisher Scena Theatre