RUNNING TIME

90 minutes with no intermission

TOURING SHOW

Daughters Of Ire has been designed as a touring production. For more information on how to bring this production to your school or event, please contact us at daughersofire@gmail.com

“With Daughters of Ire, Savanna Rae has crafted a script that’s biting, fierce, hilarious, sexy, and unsentimental—not to mention full of contradictions and incisive feminist political and cultural analysis. Still, at first glance one might ask: what is the relationship between women of ancient Irish myth and the contemporary social justice mission of a US-based collective like The Other Theatre Company? But as many feminists have long argued, there’s a powerful link between how we construct women of the past (fictional and actual) and how we imagine possibilities for self-identifying women in the future.

In other words, myths and other stories are figurative lenses through which we make sense of the world around us. Rae innately understands this—and how the politics of a story always depend on the teller. There is no such thing as an apolitical myth. In that respect, Rae participates in a time-honored feminist tradition: She shifts the lens. Using a feminist form with rich history—solo performance—she inhabits figures historically flattened out into footnotes, endowing them with evermore complexity and agency.

But what interests me most about Daughters of Ire is how its critique arises as much from feminist desire and pleasure as it does from feminist anger. Though unadulterated anger is of course a perfectly understandable feminist response to 99% of everything-everyday-everywhere, Daughters of Ire stages a ferociously ambivalent love letter. For all the sexism framing many versions of these stories, one could argue these mythic women have partially overpowered their early storytellers, at least where this playwright is concerned. These characters and their circumstances by turns fascinate, inspire, and horrify the contemporary storyteller in Daughters of Ire, herself a powerful woman making sense of a world still largely bent on destroying powerful women.

On the other hand, while the play hums with ambivalence about these myths, it’s simultaneously a bodice-ripping, breathless, no-holds-barred love letter to self-identifying women who refuse to stay put in the tight little narratives constructed for them by others. To women who exceed their bounds. To women who will not shut up. To women who love sex. To women who love fucking. To women who are just a little too interesting.

Sometimes Daughters of Ire is even—cue ambivalence again—a love letter to women who love violence. It’s also a meditation on women who have been forced to believe violence is a language they must learn to speak to survive in societies largely governed without their input or consent. In societies where those attacked are still often put on trial more readily than their attackers. In societies (like the US) where women’s bodies are still literal and ideological battlegrounds.

Given all the suffocating violence that endures around us, Daughters of Ire might even be an anxious love letter to self-identifying women of the future, too. As those women face (sadly) many of the same fights we do—but also likely struggles we cannot even predict—what will they do with the words and worlds they inherit from us?”

—Dr. Kelly Howe

Loyola University