Guidelines for the Play Requirement
(in "Living Between Worlds," Winter 2004)

The writing and production of the winter-quarter play substitute for the midterm exam and the two integrative papers of the fall quarter.  But the play is expected to serve the same purposes, i.e. to communicate your grasp of and take on the central ideas and images of the program around a theme of your own choosing. There should be no mistaking that the play came out of "Living Between Worlds." 

The play should be a one-act play, though perhaps containing several scenes.  Participants in each production (on and off-stage) should number between five and ten.   Not every participant needs to appear on stage.  Suggested length: 20 to 40 minutes. 

The focus of the play, directly or indirectly, is the focus of the winter quarter in general, namely, the question of Irish-American identity.  That question must  be, viewed in multiple perspectives (e.g. race, gender, class, religion, generation, nostalgic, tragic and comic), in a particular historical period and geographical setting--there is no one interpretation of the Irish American experience.. Given the emphasis of the winter quarter, the time-period must be post-famine.

The play must include:

1.  Characters from three generations (possibly but not necessarily related).  Some character in the play must have emigrated from Ireland.
2.  Use of all or most of the Gaelic phrases of fall quarter, as appropriate.
 	3.  Music and song (not necessarily of your own making), poetry, action,  and movement. 

The play must address at least three of the following:

	Gender and marriage and parent-child tensions
	Alcoholism
	Anti-Catholicism
	Catholicism and the influence of the Church
	Employment, unemployment, poverty, upward mobility and labor issues
	Relations with other ethnic, racial and economic groups 
	Pressures to assimilate to American culture and resistance to those pressures.
	Rapid, enforced modernization
Relationship (psychological, political, economic, cultural, musical) to Ireland, past and/or present
	Relationship to defining current events of the time period you have chosen (e.g. the Civil War in the United States, the Easter Rebellion of 1916, the assassination of JFK,  the Great Depression, the McCarthy era, anti-Vietnam protests, the River Dance phenomenon, the violence in Northern Ireland, etc., etc., etc.--whatever.)