Jim Culleton Directs ‘The Pride of Parnell Street’

NEW YORK—A very high-energy young man greets me in the lobby of off-Broadway’s 59E59 Theaters. He is Jim Culleton, artistic director of the Dublin-based Fishamble: The New Play Company, whose goal is contained within its title.

After we’re settled upstairs at a table, Jim tells me, “We’re the only company in Ireland dedicated exclusively to producing new plays.” He got his degree in drama and English at Trinity College, Dublin. Early on he set his sights on becoming a director. “I wanted to work with new playwrights.” He felt that establishing his own company would be the best way to do that.

After some tough sledding, the company, originally called Pigsback, was born. Its name was changed to Fishamble in 1988 after a playhouse on that street, which in 1784 became the first Irish theater to hold the policy of producing new Irish work. His present association with acclaimed playwright Sebastian Barry came about fortuitously. “One of my very first jobs was as assistant director on Sebastian’s play Prayers of Sherkin.”

This play was produced at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre in 1989, only a year after Fishamble had been formed. Sixteen years later, in 2005, when Amnesty International approached Jim to contribute several short plays to its project on domestic violence against women, it was relatively easy for Jim to ask Sebastian Barry to be one of those contributors. Barry came up with the original short version of The Pride of Parnell Street.

“But,” Jim says, “I felt that the piece had a larger story behind it, so I asked Sebastian to develop it into a full-length play. He actually wrote it in Philadelphia and sent it to us in Dublin in installments.” And this long version has remained. Jim adds, “Although the play was initially written for a Dublin audience, we later learned from its warm reception in London and Connecticut that it has universal appeal.”

(Other playwrights who participated in the Amnesty project include Rosalind Haslett and Belinda McKeon, whose work appears in the second program of the 1st Irish series at 59E59, entitled Spinning the Times.)Pride’s prestigious track record boasts runs in London’s Tricycle Theatre and at Dublin’s Tivoli Theatre for the Dublin Theatre Festival. It later toured in Germany, France, and to New Haven, Connecticut’s annual Festival of Arts and Ideas, a multi-arts festival. Elysabeth Kleinhans, artistic director and president of 59E59, saw the play in Dublin and was much taken by it.

George Heslin, producer of lst Irish Festival, saw it and brought about the present New York booking.Sebastian Barry’s reputation is internationally secure. His moving play The Steward of Christendom won acclaim in Ireland and the U.K. and later at BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music)—and he’s written a slew of other plays as well as novels and poetry collections, many of which have won major awards.As for Jim Culleton, his energy is displayed in Fishamble’s upcoming plans, with links to various U.S. companies.

A new play by Pat Kinevane is set for New York’s Irish Arts Center in February or March, 2010. Jean Kennedy Smith, who saw Pride in New Haven along with her sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver (recently deceased), invited the company to develop a piece for the Very Special Arts Festival in Washington D.C. next year, featuring Irish writers with disabilities, who will offer a particularly Irish slant on disability.

The Washington, D.C.-based company Solas Nua (New Light) will present a year-long program of play readings of various Fishamble plays. Jim comments, “We’re lucky to be funded by various government agencies, such as the Arts Council and Culture Ireland, and sponsors and patrons as well. This year alone, we’ve done five productions, which is a lot for a company of our size: three revivals and two new productions.”

Other productions have toured all over Europe, the U.K., as well as throughout Ireland. The company has won various awards.“All of our plays are commissioned,” he says proudly, adding, “We’ve used some plays by Americans and by writers from Vietnam and Cambodia. We’re open to all applicants.”Of Sebastian Barry, Jim Culleton remarks, “The great thing about Sebastian’s writing, besides being a poet and an amazing storyteller—he has a wonderful sense of what happens in theater.

His mother, Joan O’Hara, was a very well-known Abbey actress. So he has great respect and admiration for actors and what they do. He’s written two wonderful parts for two top young Irish actors [Aidan Kelly and Mary Murray] almost as a gift.

They really feel they’re blessed with the language he’s given them.” The play concerns a moving and unique view of a marriage and its joys and pains.“I’m biased. I’m the director—but even after three years of doing the play, recently in rehearsals my eyes are welling up with tears. So either I’m an emotional wreck or the play has something powerful about it. Hopefully the latter.”