Unlike the 16th, the 26th of this month doesn't have any particular literary resonance. However, a week from Monday, Honor Molloy and Joseph Goodrich are hosting readings of two plays at the Flea Theatre, in Tribeca, (from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.), while out in Oceanside, N.Y., Tom Phelan is one four readers at the Summer Gazebo Readings (beginning at 7 p.m.). Both events are free.
Goodrich’s “In The Drawing Room: A Visit With S. N. Behrman” takes you into the life of playwright and author S. N. Behrman. It incorporates material from his plays “The Worcester Account,” the story of his childhood in an Orthodox Jewish community in the early 1900s, and “People In A Diary,” a recounting of his life in the literary and theatrical worlds of the 1920s through the ’60s.
In Molloy’s "Dublin Noir,” it’s August 1939. Europe’s boiling up to war. But Ireland’s having none of it. On a day trip to Drogheda, Dubliner Tadgh Steele is captured by a dairy farmer and locked in a cowshed. Is Tadgh a poet as he claims or a Nazi spy? Makes no difference to the farmer’s slop girl who falls in love with the handsome stranger and casts him as the hero of a “fil-um in her head.”
For reservations for the free event at the Flea, 20 Thomas St., New York City, email info@afo.nyc.
The Summer Gazebo Readings with Phelan will take place at Schoolhouse Green, 145A Merle Ave., Oceanside, N.Y.
This event raises funds through sponsorships to send underprivileged children to Kamp Kiwanis, run by the Kiwanis of New York State. The readings are held outside and so please bring a chair.
The County Laois-born Phelan is the author most recently of “We Were Rich and We Didn’t Know It: A Memoir of My Irish Boyhood,” which Newsday’s reviewer described as ”a wonderful memoir.... the real thing.”
Former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins said, "Other works have been situated at the same intersection of time and place, but rarely has the tale been told with such a charming simplicity of voice plus a vividness that fully captures the distinctive sound and pulse of Irish life."
This spring, Phelan received a 2023 Irish Echo Arts and Culture Award in literature.
For more about the author visit tomphelan.net.
Tom Phelan.
