If you hate theatre, The Irish Pub Play might be just the play for you – at least, that’s how The King Black Box’s Ziggy Schulting sees it.
“There’s drinking, and there’s singing, and there’s dancing, and there’s voices,” she says with a grin. “And I think this is showmanship, in some ways, at its highest form.” So she’s been encouraging people to bring “friends that hate theatre. They’ll love it because the jokes are low brow, and the characters curse and drink. And it’s a true ensemble show”.
Though newly titled and extensively reimagined, The Irish Pub Play (The King Black Box’s season ender) is not a world premiere in the traditional sense. In January 2025, Aurora McClennan’s workshopped script of A Goat, A Ghost and A Guinness was brought into the creative fold at The King Black Box for a full dramaturgical and structural overhaul by McClennan, Artistic Director Schulting, Executive Artistic Director Sophie Ann Rooney (who is also the production’s designer) and dramaturg Grisha Pasternak. The group’s extensive contributions – from narrative development to character reconception – turned them into co-authors of the current iteration. To reflect this transformation, they re-branded the piece under its new title The Irish Pub Play, retaining only the character names and familial relationships from the original.
Set on the evening of their Grand Uncle Cian’s wake, The Irish Pub Play follows the Ó Súilleabháin sisters – Gráinne, Maura, and Bláithín – as they host mourners in The Goat of Arms, their family’s 100-year-old Irish pub. What begins as a typical wake quickly unravels when a Canadian tourist stumbles in, with revelations that challenge everything the sisters thought they knew about their family.
Onstage at The King Black Box in Toronto through April 13, The Irish Pub Play is a raucous, music-filled, dark comedy about grief, legacy, and the unexpected beauty of family dysfunction. The cast features Bridget Ori as Gráinne Ó Súilleabháin Murphy, Megan Miles as Maura Ó Súilleabháin, and the play’s originating playwright Aurora McClennan as Bláithín Ó Súilleabháin. Sean Irvine plays Lorcan Murphy, with Michael Joseph Delaney as Donnell O’Connell, Adam Marley as Rhys MacIntyre, Zach Parsons as Nat Gleeson, and Jenna Brown as Taylor Keel.
Fighting bows and boxes
Schulting is passionate in her desire to resist formulaic storytelling and audience expectations. “I feel like we are desperate, as people trying to sell things, to want to put on nice little bows, and put little things in boxes.” She’s “been fighting against those boxes this season, and this is another iteration of it”. After mounting George F Walker’s Girls Unwanted, the company’s previous production, Schulting felt ready for a tonal shift. “We’ve done two pretty dramatic pieces,” she says. “The last thing that I want to do right now is something that just tears away at people, or is sad.”
Instead, “I’d like to try and provide some levity in the season… I want to totally flip the script.” But not entirely. “On paper, this play is definitely a dark comedy. The event that’s taking place is a wake.” And the theatre space puts the audience right there. “We try to create what I call an immersive experience,” she explains. “I avoid ‘interactive’ because I don’t want to ask the audience to go out of their way – but I do want them to feel as much as we possibly can, as an indie theatre with a small budget. So we transport them somewhere: like a halfway house or a courtroom or a motel in Alabama”. In this case, it’s to a 100-year-old Irish bar, which is equal parts peat wood and nostalgia. “It’s supposed to be this run-down, busy place,” Schulting says, “And by busy, I mean the things on the wall, not the customers!”
The pivot to laughter should not be taken as evidence that the play lacks substance. Quite the opposite: “there are real issues that these people are dealing with,” Schulting explains. And the comedy and drama are “interwoven nicely. That’s something that I worked with Aurora a lot on: the reality that when we’re so sad, sometimes all that’s left to do is laugh. And when we’re in these really comedic moments, it’s sometimes like things are so beautiful that all you can do is cry.” As a result, the play “feels like a nice melting pot of what we do with our feelings, when we don’t know what to do with our feelings!”
Adaptability AND artistry
Schulting, Pasternak, and McClennan ultimately pursued a collaborative process of deep dramaturgical reinvention. “We wanted to make sure that what we were putting on our stage was something that was congruent with how we think that sort of story would – and should – be told,” Pasternak explains. “And what would resonate with audiences.”
Together, they worked through “structural things, character things, even little dialogue things… making sure that the themes were effective, the structure made sense, the characters were defined properly… all the little things that put us where we felt it had the best resonance for audiences.”
And this became a deeply practical exercise. From fine-tuning jokes to accommodate rehearsal fatigue, to rewriting lines to avoid nightly cake purchases (“If we don’t cut the cake, we can use it for four days.”), the process of shaping The Irish Pub Play was as much about adaptability as artistry. “It’s an ever-evolving process,” says Schulting. “And I love Aurora to death for this, too. She’s so not precious about her work, which I think is the best place to be when you’re living with a piece and evolving it.”
Actors vs characters
But more than anything, says Schulting, the cast of The Irish Pub Play has shaped its heart and humour. “These actors have a lovely opportunity, as any actors do, originating characters in a text in a new way,” she notes. And “right now, they are them.”
Amd Schulting is candid about how the characters and performers shifted almost symbiotically during the play’s redevelopment. When one actor suffered an injury during rehearsal, it was incorporated into the story. Adding a musical element in the play necessitated finding actors who were musically literate. And a character’s nationality changed when it just didn’t ring true. “If he’s the cook of the kitchen of the place, why would he be Canadian?” she recalls telling McClennan. “So now the character’s from Ireland. Conversely,” she continues, “there was a character who came in that was American, and I wondered, Can they be Canadian? Why do they have to be American? And why do they have to be simple? Can they be complex?” So these changes were pursued. “Another character is Métis. And I said, ‘let’s put her in colour… let’s put her in traditional earrings… let’s address her culture, and let’s have her say it, too’.”
An especially significant overhaul came with the character of Lorcan, the bar’s patriarch. “He was a really gruff, disgruntled, angry, mean kind of father figure in the first iterations,” Schulting explains. “But the guy playing him is the sweetest man alive. His name is Sean Irvine, and I thought, ‘there’s no way this guy is going to hit his wife. I don’t buy it.”… So now we see Lorcan being very neurotic about furniture, or sweeping, or organizing.”
This attention to authenticity and human complexity also meant jettisoning thematic freight that was too heavy for the piece or the moment. “We had started our season with a play, Rebecca Gilman’s The Glory of Living about IPV [intimate partner violence],” notes Pasternak.“We did not want to do a dark comedy that would have an IPV element as well. So instead, the creative team leaned into the story’s emotional truths: sibling dynamics, inherited burdens, and unexpected joy.
“The theme of family is really tight,” affirms Pasternak. “That comes through in the dialogue and the movement. And here’s some really great songs… that bookend the show and make that element more structurally sound.”
Not a play about Ireland – a play about people
At its core, The Irish Pub Play is about connection — between family members, community members, and even strangers across a bar. “Since the pandemic, I think we’ve taken a really big social hit in terms of communal spaces,” Schulting reflects. “Bars… are often family-owned businesses, and they talk a lot about that.” But to be clear, the setting “doesn’t have to be a bar. It just happens to be a bar.”
The sense of loss – of old ways and establishments fading – strikes a personal chord for Pasternak. “Over 2,000 pubs have closed in Ireland,” he says. “The culture of socializing over a pint…really is at a ‘losing the old guard’ moment. I’m nostalgic. My dad owned the bar in Ukraine where I grew up…. and I know that was passed on to a new owner…. These little things kind of get you to think.”
And ultimately, “having a glimpse into the inner, dysfunctional workings of a family-owned establishment – and having a couple of laughs and a drink (alcoholic or not) is absolutely what is needed!” he adds. “We need to come back to connection. We need to come back to humanity. We need to make sure that we’re giving ourselves permission to feel, and to laugh, and to just be, and have a place to feel safe.”
At the close of our conversation, Schulting, who is a longtime bartender at Irish pubs, points out that it takes “just under 120 seconds to pour a perfect pint” – then puts a smiling twist on this duration. “If you’ll allow us to have you for 120 minutes, you will hopefully feel the refreshing and full-body experience of what it’s like to have a Guinness in that two-hour span.”
Continuing, she concedes that, “this isn’t really a play about anything – in the sense that it’s a look into people’s lives.They’re very affected by these things that happen to them. If I told you the events that occurred, you wouldn’t think they were that crazy.”
“It’s incredibly familiar,” agrees Pasternak. “It’s incredibly us as human beings. It’s incredibly relatable.” So Schulting’s fervent hope for The Irish Pub Play is “that you leave feeling like you were a part of something. You were at the bar, and you got to drink with the people. You never felt alone, and you felt taken care of.
“That’s my gift and hope, because I think everyone could use some taking care of right now.”
The Irish Pub Play runs until April 13, 2025. Reserve tickets at thekingblackbox.com.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine, 2025
