American Theatre, July 1st, 2006
Have you ever wondered why the Irish theatre is littered with dead babies? You know, those children who die offstage somewhere in a distant corner of Ireland--unbaptized infants who are never seen or heard, but who leave their poor mothers grieving for the rest of the play's duration? It may have been the Irish dramatist John Millington Synge (1871-1909) who first patented the infant-death theme--old Maurya, the mother in his one-act Riders to the Sea, has lost six of them. "That makes her a hard act to follow," notes the novelist Anne Enright in Synge: A Celebration. "I only mention this be...
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