By Sean O’Driscoll

THE room is shrouded in darkness. The haunting sound of the sea comes in slowly over the quietness. We see that the stage is a cottage in the west of Ireland.

The lights are vivid, the audience are silent.

One peasant woman, Nora, sits up. “Where is she?” she says of her mother. Her sister, Cathleen, replies “She’s lying down, God help her, and may be sleeping, if she’s able.”

They open a parcel, revealing the clothes of a man drowned at sea and hope weakly that it is not the clothes of their brother, Michael.

DruidSynge, the Druid Theater company’s mammoth 8 1/2 hour production of all John Millington Synge’s works has begun at the Lincoln Center Festival.

This first play is Riders to the Sea, a stunning production that haunts the viewer long after it has finished and the women have stopped quietly keening the dead.

Although described as a tragedy, this short work ends with a note of despairing optimism as a mother finally accepts that the last of her sons has died at sea.

Next up was a thoroughly modern version of Synge’s comedy, The Tinker’s Wedding, in which the Tinkers (Irish gypsies or travelers in modern language) wear cheap jewelry, sport tattoos and pass the time sitting on a derelict car seat.

Unlike the Abbey Theater’s poorly received attempt to bring a modernized Playboy of the Western World to the U.S. for its centenary, DruidSynge’s six plays received a very positive reaction from over 600 people who filled up a theater at the John Jay College of Criminal Law in mid-Manhattan on Monday for the production, which was directed by Tony award winning director Garry Hynes.

The Synge circle will run until July 23. Tickets are only available for the whole production.

This is the first New York production of DruidSynge, which was first shown at the Galway Arts Festival in July 2005 and has since played to sell-out crowds in Dublin and Edinburgh.

Headlining the Lincoln Center Festival is a major accomplishment for the Druid, which was founded in 1975 as Ireland’s first professional theater company outside Dublin.

Before coming to New York this month, the Druid performed their Synge circle at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis at the invitation of the Guthrie’s artistic director, Joe Dowling, who is originally from Ireland.

DruidSynge

Lincoln Center Festival

John Jay

Criminal College

New York