Enda Walsh Festival
SAVE THE DATE: June 20th and 21st, 2025
Location: Atlas Performing Arts Center (1333 H St NE)
Readings, workshops, film screenings, and discussions with Enda Walsh and other special guests exploring significant works from across the career of this groundbreaking, Tony Award-winning Irish artist.
As part of our 20th anniversary season, Solas Nua is thrilled to welcome back Enda Walsh to DC. We founded the company in 2005 with Enda’s first play, Disco Pigs--which not only launched his career, but also Academy Award Winner, Cillian Murphy’s. And of course, it put Solas Nua on the map as “the most vital new troupe in town” as hailed by the Washington Post.
Over our history, we have produced 7 Enda Walsh productions, more than any company in Washington. We couldn’t be more thrilled to be working with Enda again during this special anniversary year!
Festival Schedule
Friday, June 20th | 7:00pm
Play Reading:
The Small Things
Directed by Shanara Gabrielle
A man and a woman talk about the small things - parquet floor zigzagging down corridors, the memory of mother's breasts, brown sauce and soggy chips. But these minutiae disguise a bigger story of brutality and unfaltering loyalty which emerges horrifically through the chit chat.
"Walsh once again proves himself an inspired wordsmith" - Daily Telegraph
"Walsh's beautiful, terrible play... is a small play about the big things and the writing is harrowingly precise and poetic" - Guardian
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Saturday, June 21st | 12:00pm
Play Reading:
The New Electric Ballroom
Directed by Hayley Finn
Written as a companion piece to The Walworth Farce, Enda Walsh's The New Electric Ballroom is a dark fable of the emotionally stultifying effects of small-town life. Three sisters in a remote fishing village, trapped in the years that have passed since their halcyon days at The New Electric Ballroom, are still obsessed by darker memories of something resembling romance.
“Affirms Mr. Walsh’s growing reputation as a contender to take his place in the long, distinguished line of great Irish playwrights.” - The New York Times
“Walsh lays down words with more joyous clatter than anyone else currently writing in the theatre.” - The Independent
“Walsh goes beyond Beckett and creates his own brilliantly skewed world.” - Variety
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Saturday, June 21st | 12:00pm
Film Screening:
Small Things Like These
Adapted by Enda Walsh | Starring Academy Award winner, Cillian Murphy
A loving father (Cillian Murphy) finds disturbing secrets at a local convent, forcing him to confront the complicit silence of a small Irish town controlled by the Catholic Church.
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Saturday, June 21st | 7:00pm
Play Reading:
Medicine
Post show discussion with Enda Walsh and Ben Brantley, former chief critic of the New York Times.
John Kane is sitting on a hospital gurney, and very shortly a jazz percussionist, two women called Mary, a very old man and a giant lobster will arrive. Then everything will start.
Medicine is a dark and frequently absurdist work that shatters the boundary between cast and audience. It is a devastatingly funny and moving meditation on how, for decades, we have treated those we call ‘mentally ill’.
“The best medicine anyone can ask for.” - New York Times Critics’ Pick
★ ★ ★ ★ ★"pitch-perfect, hilarious … unforgettable" - The Observer
A WORD FROM OUR ARTISTIC DIRECTOR OF THEATRE, REX DAUGHERTY
As an artist I often force myself to ask, “can a single play change anyone’s life?” If I might humbly, or even cynically, pose that question. I strive to make work that resonates with audiences, our city, our world. It’s embarrassing to be that ambitious sometimes, and yet, if artists don’t dream that boldly, that recklessly, then what’s the point? There’s a certain madness it takes to be an artist, and one of my greatest heroes for embodying that artistic madness is Enda Walsh.
I keep making theatre because I know that a single play can indeed change someone’s life. I know it first hand.
Enda’s play, Disco Pigs, changed my life. It showed me a vision of what theatre COULD be - daring, hilarious, physical, sweaty, broken, haunting - nothing short of humanity. Armed with only a shopping cart for a set, the play careens out of control and, with wild abandon, it captured my imagination.
It also changed my career. I was a freelance actor who stumbled across an audition for a company I’d never heard of - Solas Nua. It was 2008, and this company I couldn’t pronounce was taking this oddly named play Off Broadway. I had heard of that - ha! So sure, I thought, who wouldn’t want that opportunity?! As soon as I was cast, I quickly discovered I was in for something groundbreaking.
Disco Pigs was unlike anything I’d ever read or seen. Written in Cork slang and baby-talk, (what?!?) I could barely understand the words I was seeing on the page. Guided by the expert vision of Solas Nua’s founding artistic director, Linda Murray, my co-star Madeleine Carr and I waded into the deep waters of Enda Walsh’s mad, beautiful mind. The show sold out. We got a rave review in the New York Times. There was a banner of our faces hanging outside 59E59 that was three stories tall. We landed on the cover of American Theatre Magazine. Linda asked me to join Solas Nua as a company member. Years later, I now serve as the Artistic Director. The stuff of dreams.
But beyond my own experience, there’s a special alchemy and history of this play. It launched the career of not only Enda Walsh, but also the great Irish talent, Cillian Murphy - now the only Irish artist to win an Oscar for Best Actor. If you’ve seen him in literally anything, then you already know his incredible talent. The film of Disco Pigs starred Cillian Murphy and Eileen Walsh, who would also become an Irish acting super star. How is it that so many artists would launch onto the world’s stage with this wild, unruly play? No wonder, then, that this is the play Linda Murray would pick as the first production for Solas Nua - back in 2005. It would mark the first time Enda Walsh’s work had come to DC - but certainly not the last.
Since these auspicious beginnings, Solas Nua has produced seven Enda Walsh productions, more than any DC company. His daring work is woven into the DNA of Solas Nua, and over our 20 years, Washington has taken notice. Recipient of the DC Mayor’s Arts Award for “Innovation in the Arts” - our passion is to showcase the cutting edge, the bold new vision for the arts.
Call us mad, but we dare to believe that the arts can change our lives.
