Eight-and-a-half hours is a very long time to occupy a
theater seat; it requires courage and stamina on the part of
the audience member and a certain bravura arrogance from the
producer and director: whatever is asking so much from
paying customers had better be well worth the watching. I
can still remember, along with all the accolades, cries of
anguish from people subjected to Peter Brook’s day-long
Mahabarata.

But I think few will regret having invested their time in
the Lincoln Center
Festival’s DruidSynge, the sequential
presentation of all six plays of John Millington Synge by
Galway’s Druid Theater Company. Founded in 1975 as the
first professional theater company in Ireland outside of
Dublin, the Druid is probably best known in this country for
its 1998 production of The Beauty Queen of Leenane, for
which Druid’s founding director Garry Hynes and founding
company member Marie Mullen both won Tony Awards.

DruidSynge offered New York audiences two rare
experiences. First, it was a chance to see complex ensemble
play in which the actors, clearly comfortable as a group,
demonstrate their skill and flexibility as they move in and
out of contrasting roles. Then, any full-scale
retrospective of one artist’s work is always a revelation,
whether the artist be a playwright, painter, or musician:
themes and motifs that might not have made much sense in an
individual piece suddenly accrue new significance as they
reappear throughout a life’s work. The plays of Synge, seen
at