PLAYWRITING
Colm Summers is an award-winning Irish playwright based in Brooklyn, originally from rural West Waterford. He is interested in class, power, and belonging through the lenses of contemporary Ireland, Americanization, and global neoliberalism.
His play Falls won the 2026 Phoenix Theatre Company Festival of New American Theatre, received a 2024 Relentless Award Honorable Mention from the American Playwriting Foundation, and has been developed by New York Stage and Film, The Drama League, Irish Arts Center and Origin Theatre Company, the cell, Fishamble and Garter Lane Arts Centre. Summers received the Arts Council of Ireland’s 2023 Next Generation Artist Award for Playwriting, with Falls as his award project and Marina Carr as his mentor.
His plays have been commissioned or developed by Irish Arts Center, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, BRIC, New York Stage and Film, The Drama League, Phoenix Theatre Company, Fishamble: The New Play Company, Garter Lane Arts Centre, Origin Theatre Company, Project Arts Centre, Pan Pan, the cell, 59E59 Theaters and Mercury Store. He is a member of Origin Theatre Company’s Scéal Nua writers group. His writing has also been recognized by Cherry Lane Theatre, Local Theater Company, Fault Line Theatre, Pipeline Theatre Company and Ars Nova.
Summers is the Artistic Director of Working Theater in New York. His academic writing on theater has been published by Liverpool University Press, Brill and Études.
PRESS
AMERICAN THEATRE
“I think of Ireland like a green mirror for what’s happening here, or for what’s happening globally.”
— Colm Summers, American Theatre, “In New York City, a ‘New Story’ for Irish Playwrights”, April 2025
SELECTED RECOGNITION
SCRIPTS
2026
Phoenix Theatre Company Festival of New American Theatre — Winner, Falls
Cherry Lane Playwrights Collective — Semifinalist
Local Theater Company, Local Lab 15 — Semifinalist, Falls
2025
Fault Line Theatre, Irons in the Fire — Semifinalist
2024
American Playwriting Foundation Relentless Award — Honorable Mention, Falls
The Drama League — Next Stage Fellow, Falls
Fault Line Theatre, Irons in the Fire — Semifinalist
Pipeline PlayLab — Semifinalist
2023–24
Ars Nova Play Group — Semifinalist
2023
Arts Council of Ireland — Next Generation Artist Award: Playwriting
2022
Puffin Foundation — Grant Award
Arts Council of Ireland — Agility Award
2021
Arts Council of Ireland — Theatre Project Award
Scripts available upon request.
Please reach out to Colm or his representation directly.
REPRESENTATION
SELECTED COMMISSIONS + DEVELOPMENT
Irish Arts Center — Heavy Metal
Commission + 29-hour development
Dani Bernfeld + James Brown — Balconies
Commission
Lower Manhattan Cultural Council — Psychic Advisor
Commission
BRIC — A Shadow on the Lung
Resident Artist development
The Drama League — Falls
Next Stage Fellowship
New York Stage and Film — Falls
the cell — Falls
Artist residency
Garter Lane Arts Centre — Falls / Purgatory: After Yeats
Fishamble: The New Play Company — Falls / Purgatory: After Yeats
Origin Theatre Company / Scéal Nua — Sunburn / Falls
Mercury Store Director’s Lab — Balconies
59E59 Theaters — Psychic Advisor
A play by Colm Summers
A coming-of-age comedy about caregiving.
ABOUT
When a young father is diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, he does everything he can to protect his relationship with his son.
As his condition progresses, their roles begin to reverse. The father’s expectations of what it means to provide, protect and parent start to fall away; his son, meanwhile, has to grow into a kind of care neither of them expected him to give.
Set in rural Ireland, Falls is a play about fatherhood, queerness, care and forgiveness.
DEVELOPMENT
Arts Council of Ireland · 2023
Falls was the project for which I received the Arts Council of Ireland’s Next Generation Artist Award in 2023.
The Next Generation Artist Award supports a small group of artists at a formative stage in their practice, giving them time, resources and mentorship to develop ambitious new work. I received the award in 2023 to write Falls, with the playwright Marina Carr as my mentor.
That relationship was particularly important to the development of Falls: an Irish family play concerned with inheritance, parents and children, the violence and tenderness contained inside family structures, and the ways the past continues to live inside the present.
The Next Generation Award became the foundation for the subsequent development of the play in Ireland and the United States.
Marina Carr is one of Ireland’s leading contemporary playwrights. Her plays include By the Bog of Cats, The Mai, Portia Coughlan, Woman and Scarecrow and Girl on an Altar, and her work has been produced by the Abbey Theatre, the Royal Court, the National Theatre and internationally.
THE CELL
ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE WORKSHOP
The Cell Theatre · New York
May 17–19, 2024
Written and directed by Colm Summers.
The Cell selected Falls for a developmental residency and workshop in New York.
The Cell described it as:
“not-your-mother’s Parkinson’s play.” (the cell)
That was fun.
THE DRAMA LEAGUE
NEXT STAGE FELLOWSHIP
The Drama League · 2024
I was selected for the Drama League’s 2024 Next Stage Residency with Falls.
The Drama League described Falls as:
“a profound play, which examines father + son relationships through the lens of health, love and (at times) the lack of both.” (The Drama League)
The Next Stage residency also brought Falls into New York Stage and Film’s 2024 season, where the Drama League was one of the organizations in residence.
RELENTLESS AWARD
2024 HONORABLE MENTION
Falls received a 2024 Relentless Award Honorable Mention from the American Playwriting Foundation.
The Relentless Award is the American Playwriting Foundation’s annual award for new American plays.
The Foundation’s official 2024 record lists Falls among that year’s Honorable Mentions. (APF)
SCÉAL NUA
IRISH ARTS CENTER / ORIGIN THEATRE COMPANY
Irish Arts Center · New York
June 16, 2025
Falls was selected for the inaugural Scéal Nua Play Readings, presented by Origin Theatre Company at Irish Arts Center.
The festival brought together new work by Irish and Irish-diaspora playwrights.
PHOENIX THEATRE
COMPANY
28TH ANNUAL RICHARD P. STAHL FESTIVAL OF NEW AMERICAN THEATRE
Phoenix Theatre Company · Phoenix, Arizona
January 2026
Falls was selected for the Phoenix Theatre Company’s 28th Annual Richard P. Stahl Festival of New American Theatre.
Directed by Ron May
Phoenix described the play as:
The festival presented Falls as its opening, and only new play of the festival in January 2026. (The Phoenix Theatre Company)
THE PARKINSON’S FOUNDATION
The project has an ongoing community engagement partnership with The Parkinson’s Foundation, facilitated by Sabela Avion.
The Parkinson’s Foundation is a national nonprofit organization working to improve care and quality of life for people with Parkinson’s disease while advancing research toward a cure. The Foundation provides education, resources and community support for people with Parkinson’s, their families and care partners.
Mentor: Marina Carr
FEATURED AT
THE PLAY
2026 Phoenix Theater Festival of New American Plays Winner
2025 New York Stage and Film, Philadelphia
2024 Relentless Award Honorable Mention
2024 New York Stage and Film, New York
2024 Drama League Next Stage Fellowship
2023 The Cell Artist in Resident, New York
2023 Next Generation Artist Award — Arts Council of Ireland
Characters: 2
Setting: Rural Ireland, Blackwater Valley
Running time: Approximately 80 minutes
IRELAND DEVELOPMENT
FISHAMBLE / ARTS COUNCIL OF IRELAND / GARTER LANE
The early development of Falls was supported in Ireland by Fishamble: The New Play Company, the Arts Council of Ireland and Garter Lane Arts Centre in Waterford. (Theaterlab)
Garter Lane was especially meaningful as a development home: the play is by a Waterford writer and many of my plays are set there, so starting there for such an intimate play felt like setting out from home, its A Little Room artist-development program. (Garter Lane)
NEW YORK STAGE AND FILM
FALL SEASON PLAY READINGS
New York Stage and Film + Penn Live Arts
University of Pennsylvania · Philadelphia
October 2 & 4, 2025
Written by Colm Summers
Directed by Michael Wilson
Following the earlier Drama League development, Falls was selected by New York Stage and Film for two public readings at Penn Live Arts.
Director Michael Wilson led the presentation.
CAST
DAD
Frank Wood
SON
Sebastian Beacon
Stage Manager
Campbell Anidjar
Stage Directions
Pradanya Subramanyan
The October 4 performance was followed by a conversation with Colm Summers and Michael Wilson, moderated by Brooke O’Hara of the University of Pennsylvania. (Penn Live Arts)
AWARDS + DEVELOPMENT
2023
NEXT GENERATION ARTIST AWARD
Arts Council of Ireland
Falls selected as my Next Generation project
Mentorship with Marina Carr
2023–24
IRELAND DEVELOPMENT
Fishamble
Arts Council of Ireland
Garter Lane Arts Centre
MAY 2024
ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE WORKSHOP
The Cell Theatre, New York
2024
NEXT STAGE FELLOW
The Drama League
Falls
2024
RELENTLESS AWARD
Honorable Mention
American Playwriting Foundation
JUNE 2025
SCÉAL NUA
Origin Theatre Company / Irish Arts Center
New York
OCTOBER 2025
NEW YORK STAGE AND FILM
Penn Live Arts
Directed by Michael Wilson
Featuring Frank Wood and Sebastian Beacon
JANUARY 2026
RICHARD P. STAHL FESTIVAL OF NEW AMERICAN THEATRE
Phoenix Theatre Company
Directed by Ron May
FALLS
A play by Colm Summers
Two strangers enter a fraudulent marriage to keep one of them in America. Then they have to convince the government they’re in love.
ABOUT
A woman agrees to marry a non-citizen for $10,000. To survive the federal marriage interview, they have eleven months to construct a relationship convincing enough to pass as love: moving in together, meeting each other’s families, memorizing favorite colors and sides of the bed, and rehearsing answers to increasingly intimate questions. But as the United States around them becomes more hostile to immigrants, the distinction between the marriage they are performing and the relationship they are actually building becomes harder to maintain. Interviews is a two-person dark romantic comedy about immigration, intimacy and the dangerous possibility that pretending to love somebody might require knowing them for real.
CHARACTERS
WOMAN
Thirties. Citizen.
Practical, controlled and acutely aware of the danger involved in what they are doing. She enters the arrangement for money, initially insisting on strict boundaries: this is a transaction, not a romance.
MAN
Thirties. Non-citizen.
Charming, funny and increasingly vulnerable to a political reality he would rather believe he can outrun. He needs the marriage to remain in the United States — a country he already considers home.
THE PLAY
Genre
Dark comedy / romantic drama
Cast
2 actors
Setting
New York City
The play exists between the waiting room at 26 Federal Plaza and the eleven months that brought the couple there.
Running Time
Approximately 90 minutes
Development Status
In development
SELECTED THEMES
Immigration and citizenship
Marriage and the state
Love as performance
Surveillance
Home and belonging
Transactional intimacy
Trust and betrayal
INTERVIEWS
A play by Colm Summers
In the bohemian art world of nineteenth-century London and Paris, a poor Irish woman becomes one of the most famous women of her age — and no one knows her name.
ABOUT
Joanna Hiffernan escapes famine in Ireland and poverty in London to become a model, muse and central figure in the bohemian art scenes of nineteenth-century London and Paris. Lover and collaborator of James McNeill Whistler, intimately connected to Gustave Courbet, and surrounded by the artists and provocateurs who would transform modern culture, Joanna finds herself at the center of a world in which art, sex, celebrity and power are impossible to separate. As her image circulates through galleries and salons, the woman inside those images begins to ask who is doing the looking — and who gets to make the art.
Heavy Metal is an irreverent, erotic historical play about art and authorship, love and obsession, class and celebrity, and the cruelty and care contained in the act of looking at another person. The draft describes its central concern simply: “what it means to see and be seen.”
CHARACTERS
JOANNA HIFFERNAN
Gender: Woman
Race/Ethnicity: White
Age: Flexible
Artist, model, immigrant, lover and survivor. Born into poverty, Joanna escapes the aftermath of the Great Famine and enters the bohemian art worlds of London and Paris. She becomes Whistler’s model and partner and one of the defining faces of nineteenth-century painting, while struggling against the distinction between being the subject of art and being permitted to make it herself.
BOHEMIAN 1
Bridget (Bridie) / Oscar Wilde / Art Dealer
Gender: FLEXIBLE
Race/Ethnicity: FLEXIBLE
Age: FLEXIBLE
BOHEMIAN 2
Sean / Maggie / Winny / Nazi 1 / Dante Rossetti / Khalil
Gender: FLEXIBLE
Race/Ethnicity: FLEXIBLE
Age: FLEXIBLE
BOHEMIAN 3
Catherine / Nazi 2 / Fantin
Gender: FLEXIBLE
Race/Ethnicity: FLEXIBLE
Age: FLEXIBLE
BOHEMIAN 4
Whistler / Inspector / Sally
Gender: FLEXIBLE
Race/Ethnicity: FLEXIBLE
Age: FLEXIBLE
BOHEMIAN 5
Courbet / Doctor / Libby / Degas / New Tenant
Gender: FLEXIBLE
Race/Ethnicity: FLEXIBLE
Age: FLEXIBLE
The five Bohemians function as an ensemble, continually transforming into Joanna’s family, lovers, artists, critics, friends and strangers. Their casting across gender, race and age is deliberately flexible; Joanna’s identity as a white Irish woman is fixed.
THE PLAY
Genre
Historical drama / comedy
Cast
6 actors
Setting
Ireland, London, Paris and France in the nineteenth century, with the play extending across Joanna Hiffernan’s life.
Running Time
Approximately 2 hours
Development Status
In development
The play is written for Joanna and an ensemble of five Bohemians, who transform into the people around her.
SELECTED THEMES
Art and authorship
The gaze
Women and representation
Ireland and emigration
Class mobility
Sex and erotic power
Celebrity
Artists and their muses
Love, obsession and betrayal
Who gets remembered — and who gets to make the record
HEAVY METAL
IRISH ARTS CENTER COMMISSION
Heavy Metal was commissioned by Irish Arts Center in New York.
The commission supported a major period of writing and development during my residency at Irish Arts Center in 2024, culminating in a 29-hour developmental reading in July 2024.
JOANNA HIFFERNAN
Joanna Hiffernan was an Irish-born nineteenth-century model closely associated with the painters James McNeill Whistler and Gustave Courbet. Her image survives in some of the period’s most recognizable paintings, most famously Whistler’s Symphony in White works, and she has long been associated with Courbet’s scandalous L’Origine du monde.
That historical imbalance — an extraordinarily recognizable image attached to a woman about whom comparatively little was recorded — is one of the provocations behind Heavy Metal.
The play imagines Joanna not simply as muse or model but as a person looking back: a working-class Irish immigrant navigating artists, lovers, markets and institutions that continually transform her body into art.
DEVELOPMENT HISTORY
2024
COMMISSION
Irish Arts Center
New York
JULY 2024
ARTIST RESIDENCY
Irish Arts Center
New York
JULY 2024
29-HOUR DEVELOPMENTAL READING
Irish Arts Center
New York
A play by Colm Summers
A wealthy American woman hires a local Irish sunroom designer to perfect the view from her new home.
ABOUT
High above an Irish valley, a wealthy American woman is building the perfect home: ancestral land, commanding views, a baby on the way, and one final addition — a sunroom. She hires a local designer whose passion for “bright space design” quickly becomes something more complicated. As a spring storm gathers, their conversation about taste, belonging, property and what makes a place home is interrupted by the arrival of a badly beaten woman from the valley below.
Sunburn is a dark comedy about looking, ownership, return and the violence hidden inside a beautiful view.
CHARACTERS
CATHERINE
Gender: Woman
Race/Ethnicity: White American
Age: FLEXIBLE
A wealthy American who has relocated to rural Ireland and built a home overlooking the valley from which she believes her family originated. Pregnant, idealistic and intensely invested in the idea that she has “returned” somewhere meaningful, she wants her new sunroom to frame the landscape perfectly. Her confidence in inheritance, ownership and belonging begins to fracture when the landscape starts speaking back.
BRIDIE
Gender: Woman
Race/Ethnicity: White Irish
Age: FLEXIBLE
A local, self-taught sunroom designer who considers herself an artist. Warm, funny, ingratiating and apparently eager to collaborate, she speaks fluently in the language of view, light, shelter, taste and aspiration. Her relationship to the house — and to the land beneath it — is much more personal than her client understands.
EILEEN
Gender: Woman
Race/Ethnicity: Flexible Irish
Age: FLEXIBLE
A local woman who arrives badly beaten, bleeding and severely sunburnt. Disoriented and searching for her missing daughter, Anne, she describes an encounter at a place she has visited since childhood — land that has recently become private property.
PAUDY THE AMBULANCE MAN
Gender: FLEXIBLE
Race/Ethnicity: FLEXIBLE
Age: FLEXIBLE
A local ambulance worker who arrives to take Eileen away. He knows who she is immediately: “everyone knows Eileen.”
THE PLAY
Genre
Dark comedy / thriller
Cast
4 actors
Setting
A newly built house high above an Irish river valley.
Running Time
Approximately 75 minutes
Development Status
In development
SELECTED THEMES
Land and ownership
Home and belonging
Irish identity and diaspora
Class
Gentrification
The gaze
Property and inheritance
Tourism and “return”
Beauty and violence
Looking versus seeing
Myth and folklore
SUNBURN
ORIGIN THEATRE COMPANY
Sunburn was written as part of Origin Theatre Company’s Scéal Nua writers group, a program supporting the development of new work by Irish and Irish-diaspora writers.
The play emerged from my continuing interest in contemporary Ireland as a place where questions of land, class, migration and national identity collide — particularly the difference between belonging to a place, buying a place, and looking at a place.
DEVELOPMENT HISTORY
2024
SCÉAL NUA WRITERS GROUP
Origin Theatre Company
New York
Written and developed as part of Origin Theatre Company’s Scéal Nua writers group.
The Damien Dempsey Musical
Created by James Brown and Colm Summers
Music and Lyrics by Damien Dempsey
Book by James Brown and Colm Summers
Directed by Colm Summers
A musical about building a home in a broken place.
ABOUT
Donaghmede, Dublin, 2010. In the wreckage of the Celtic Tiger, a group of neighbors meet every week in a community-center songwriting class to sing about the lives they’re trying to hold together. When a young man in trouble joins the group and a major redevelopment threatens to remake the neighborhood around them, questions of home, ambition, addiction, emigration and who Ireland is being built for become impossible to avoid. Built around the songs of Damien Dempsey, Balconies is an ensemble musical about a community learning that sometimes the radical choice isn’t to escape where you come from — it’s to stay and fight for it.
CHARACTERS
CHRIS — 37
Gender: Man
Race/Ethnicity: Irish
Age: 30s–40s
A local musician who never left Donaghmede and founded the songwriting group at the community center. Dry, sarcastic and affectionate; he teaches through teasing and blunt honesty. A survivor of addiction who has become mentor, organizer and unofficial caretaker to the people around him. For Chris, Ireland is the people.
STEVIE — 25
Gender: Man
Race/Ethnicity: Afro-Irish
Age: 20s
A gifted young songwriter from Donaghmede and second-generation immigrant. Chris’s protégé, full of boyish bravado and effortless charisma, and on the brink of an American tour that might take him away from the community that made him. For Stevie, Ireland is the past.
AVA — 42
Gender: Woman
Race/Ethnicity: Irish
Age: 40s
A former Donaghmede resident who built a life in New York and returns to help her aging parents, finding the neighborhood in the middle of rapid redevelopment. Direct, pragmatic and protective. For Ava, Ireland needs to be protected.
MARY — 63
Gender: Woman
Race/Ethnicity: Irish
Age: 60s+
A retired cleaner and widow who spends most of her days watching television. Her husband died doing factory work, and the songwriting class is one of the only reasons she regularly leaves the house. Lonely, deadpan, gossipy and deeply funny. For Mary, Ireland is no good without family.
MICHAEL — 48
Gender: Man
Race/Ethnicity: Irish
Age: 40s–50s
An unemployed tradesman and former construction worker whose livelihood disappeared with the collapse of the Celtic Tiger. Gruff, self-deprecating and paternal, he is struggling with what it means to no longer be able to provide for his family. For Michael, Ireland disappeared a long time ago.
RITA — 34
Gender: Woman
Race/Ethnicity: Nigerian-Irish / first-generation immigrant
Age: 30s
Works part-time in retail while raising her young child. Stevie’s cousin, with older-sister energy and one of the strongest technical voices in the group.
JOEY — 30
Gender: Man
Race/Ethnicity: Irish
Age: 20s–30s
Recently sober after several difficult years of addiction. Restless, funny and the relentless class clown of the group. Maggie’s partner in crime — and perhaps something more.
MAGGIE — 28
Gender: Woman
Race/Ethnicity: Irish
Age: 20s–30s
Disability: Paraplegic
Paralyzed in a joyriding accident. Loud, rambunctious, endlessly chatty and armed with gallows humor. Her relationship with Joey carries the energy of two people who can make almost anything into a joke.
DANNY — 19
Gender: Man
Race/Ethnicity: Irish
Age: Late teens / early 20s
New to the songwriting group. Quiet, introverted, troubled and difficult to read; a decent kid who has already seen too much. Chris recognizes something of his younger self in him and begins trying to pull him away from addiction and toward the community. For Danny, Ireland is a broken home.
SEAMUS — 58
Gender: Man
Race/Ethnicity: Irish
Age: 50s–60s
A former IRA man turned property developer. Charismatic, generous, ambitious and deeply embedded in the community — the kind of man who buys a drink for the whole bar. He believes development means progress. For Seamus, Ireland is the future.
ENSEMBLE
The wider Donaghmede community: neighbors, musicians, pub regulars, developers, families and new members of the songwriting group.
THE MUSICAL
Music and Lyrics
Damien Dempsey
Book
James Brown and Colm Summers
Created by
James Brown and Colm Summers
Director
Colm Summers
Genre
Contemporary Irish musical / ensemble drama
Setting
An apartment complex, community center, pub and surrounding neighborhood in Donaghmede, Dublin
Time
2010
Cast
10 principal actors + ensemble
Development Status
In development
The score draws from Damien Dempsey’s catalogue, with songs emerging directly from the lives of the characters and the community around them.
SELECTED THEMES
Community
Working-class Dublin
Home and belonging
Addiction and recovery
Emigration and return
Gentrification and redevelopment
Masculinity
Immigration and Irish identity
Music-making
Mentorship
The Celtic Tiger and its aftermath
Who gets to remain in a changing city
BALCONIES
DAMIEN DEMPSEY
Damien Dempsey is one of Ireland’s most distinctive contemporary singer-songwriters, combining folk, traditional Irish music, rock, reggae and social commentary in songs rooted in working-class Dublin.
Balconies is the official Damien Dempsey musical, built around his existing catalogue and the communities, politics and emotional terrain from which that music emerged.
DEVELOPMENT HISTORY
COMMISSION
Commissioned by Dani Bernfeld and James Brown
MARCH 2026
DIRECTOR’S LAB
Mercury Store
Brooklyn, New York
CURRENT
Book and score development
In development
COMMISSION
Balconies was commissioned by Dani Bernfeld and James Brown as the official stage musical built around the songs of Damien Dempsey.
Music and Lyrics
Damien Dempsey
Book
James Brown and Colm Summers
Created by
James Brown and Colm Summers
Director
Colm Summers
MERCURY STORE
Director’s Lab · March 2026
Balconies received a period of development at Mercury Store in Brooklyn as part of its 2026 Director’s Lab.
The residency provided dedicated space to investigate the musical in development under my direction, with particular attention to its theatrical language, ensemble storytelling and the relationship between Damien Dempsey’s existing catalogue and the dramatic lives of the characters.
A play with magic by Colm Summers
Conceived with Rakesh Palisetty
Co-created with Rakesh Palisetty and Vinny DePonto
A disgraced celebrity mind-reader returns to the stage for one last trick.
ABOUT
After a spectacular public breakdown destroys his career, a world-famous magician, medium and mentalist returns to New York for one last show. This time, instead of convincing an audience that he can read their minds, hypnotize strangers and communicate with the dead, he intends to expose exactly how he does it. With audience members playing the people from his past, Psychic Advisor turns a magic show inside out to tell the story of an entertainer confronting grief, addiction, love, manipulation and the difference between creating the illusion of healing and actually changing.
CHARACTERS
PSYCHIC ADVISOR
Gender: Man
Age: 30s
Race/Ethnicity: FLEXIBLE
Special Skills: Magician
A magician, medium and mentalist whose enormous professional success has been followed by an equally public collapse. Funny, charismatic and extraordinarily skilled at controlling a room, he has built a career convincing strangers that he understands them better than they understand themselves. Returning to the stage after treatment, he attempts something much more dangerous than another comeback: telling the truth.
THE PLAY
Genre
Play with magic / solo performance / audience participation
Cast
1 performer + volunteer audience members
Setting
A theater in the present, with the audience helping reconstruct episodes from the Psychic Advisor’s past.
Running Time
Approximately 75 minutes
Development Status
In development
The script requires only one professional performer. Every other character is embodied by volunteer audience members, whose real answers are incorporated into the performance and can alter details of the story from night to night.
SELECTED THEMES
Magic and belief
Grief
Healing
Addiction and recovery
Celebrity and public failure
Manipulation
Mentalism and deception
Love and forgiveness
Performance and authenticity
The desire for meaning
Human unpredictability
PSYCHIC ADVISOR
THE MAGIC
Psychic Advisor uses the techniques of mentalism, hypnosis, cold reading and stage magic as its theatrical language. The Psychic Advisor begins as the person who knows more than everyone else in the room. As the performance progresses, he dismantles that authority himself: explaining his methods, exposing his tricks and demonstrating how easily apparent insight can be manufactured.
DEVELOPMENT HISTORY
COMMISSION
Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC)
DEVELOPMENT
59E59 Theaters
New York
CO-CREATED WITH
Rakesh Palisetty
Vinny DePonto
CURRENT
In development
COMMISSION
Psychic Advisor was commissioned by Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC).
The project was co-created with Rakesh Palisetty and Vinny DePonto, bringing together playwriting, performance and contemporary magic
59E59 THEATERS
Psychic Advisor received developmental support at 59E59 Theaters in New York.
The development focused on the relationship between scripted storytelling, live magic and genuine audience participation — particularly the mechanics required for the performer to incorporate information supplied by volunteers while preserving the dramatic architecture of the play.
A play by Colm Summers
In a dying village in rural Ireland, two sisters fight to save the family shop while an American teenager across the road becomes the face of everything replacing them.
ABOUT
West Waterford, 2023. Daisy “Des” Morrisey has spent her life behind the counter of the village newsagent her father left her. But the shop is drowning, the local Garda is on holiday in Magaluf, an American family has opened a gleaming new business across the road, and the Ireland Des understands appears to be disappearing around her.
When a confrontation with the Americans’ teenage son sets off a chain of increasingly disastrous attempts to save the shop, five people are forced to reckon with what they inherited, what they imagined they were owed, and whether preserving a place can become another way of destroying it.
A Shadow on the Lung is a dark comedy about rural Ireland in the aftermath of globalization: family, class, American money, immigration, masculinity, small-town mythology and the terrifying possibility that nostalgia for home can make it impossible to see the place in front of you.
CHARACTERS
DAISY “DES” MORRISEY — 64
Gender: Woman
Race/Ethnicity: White Irish
Age: 60s
A newsagent and Gerry’s twin sister. Fiercely funny, combative and territorial, Des has spent her life protecting the shop inherited from their father and the version of the village she believes it represents. She is charismatic enough to hold a community together and stubborn enough to burn it down rather than admit that it has already changed.
GERALDINE “GERRY” MORRISEY — 64
Gender: Woman
Race/Ethnicity: White Irish
Age: 60s
Des’s twin sister and a former jockey. Pragmatic where Des is romantic, Gerry understands before her sister does that the shop cannot survive. She walks with a hospital-issued stick and has spent much of her life managing the consequences of other people’s choices. She would quite like, finally, to go somewhere nobody knows her.
VINCENT “VIDEOMAN” KIELY — 49
Gender: Man
Race/Ethnicity: White Irish
Age: Late 40s–50s
A handyman, former mobile video-rental entrepreneur and Des’s lover — or almost-lover — of twenty years. Loyal, sentimental and endlessly accommodating until accommodation becomes impossible. Once upon a time, Vinny drove around the parish renting VHS tapes from the back of a converted HiAce van. He still understands life largely through movies.
NICOLE “NICKY” GUIRY — 15¾
Gender: Woman
Race/Ethnicity: Afro Irish
Age: Teenager
Des’s employee and an aspiring entrepreneur. Sharp, ambitious, irreverent and impatient with the adults around her, Nicky is growing up in an Ireland more complicated than any of their stories about it. Her mother is Irish; her father is from Trinidad and Tobago. She attended Gaelscoil, speaks Irish, and has little patience for anyone who imagines those things can settle the question of who belongs.
YOUNGFLA — 16
Gender: Man
Race/Ethnicity: White American
Age: Teenager
Des’s nemesis. A recent arrival from Boston, rap enthusiast and son of the American family across the road. Initially he appears to embody almost everything Des resents about the new village: American money, romanticized Irishness and displacement. Underneath the performance is a lonely sixteen-year-old whose family has been uprooted and whose father has recently been diagnosed with cancer.
BRIC
A Shadow on the Lung was developed during my time as a Resident Artist at BRIC in Brooklyn.
The residency supported the development of the play and its investigation of rural Ireland at a moment when global capital, American cultural influence, demographic change and the long aftermath of the Celtic Tiger were transforming ideas of community and belonging.
THE PLAY
Genre
Dark comedy
Cast
5 actors
Setting
The Blackwater River valley, West Waterford, rural Ireland.
Time
2023
Running Time
Approximately 100 minutes
Development Status
In development
SELECTED THEMES
Rural Ireland
Americanization
Family and inheritance
Small businesses and economic precarity
Class
Immigration and belonging
Irish identity
Race and nationality
Diaspora and return
Parents and children
Nostalgia
Community
Masculinity
Language
Globalization
The difference between preserving a place and allowing it to change
A SHADOW ON THE LUNG
DEVELOPMENT HISTORY
BRIC
Resident Artist
Brooklyn, New York
A Shadow on the Lung was developed during my residency at BRIC.
CURRENT
In development