As part of a special series “Mining the Theatre Archives @NUIG”

On their website, the Abbey Theatre includes Sam Shepard in a roundup of playwrights whose work they have “premiered and nurtured.” As the only non-Irish writer on this list, Shepard’s appeal to the Abbey (and their appeal to him) is curious. Drawing from materials in the archive, this talk will situation Shepard’s presence within a longer history of American playwrights on the stage of Ireland’s national theatre before turning to a reading of Shepard’s specific concerns. In both his revision of canonical works and creation of new plays for the Abbey, I argue that Shepard presents a much older relationship between the US and Ireland–one that begins in the Ulster Plantation and the subsequent first wave of Irish immigrants to colonial America. Consistently invoking the historical present, Shepard uses this figure of the Scots-Irish to critique the violent and mythological foundations of America in the wake of the War on Terror.

Christina Wilson is a PhD candidate from the English Department of the University of Connecticut and a Visiting Fulbright Student Scholar in Theatre Studies at NUIG. Her dissertation, Scots-Irish Frontiers across 20th- and 21st-century American Literature, traces how the Scots-Irish figure is used as metaphor in various cultural texts. Previous publications have appeared in Irish Studies Review, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, and the book Imagining Human Rights in Twenty-First-Century Theatre: Global Perspectives.