KORDA’S 2026 SEASON CONTINUES WITH TONY AWARD-WINNING MEMORY PLAY “DANCING AT LUGHNASA”
Korda Artistic Productions’ 2026 season continues with the poignant Tony Award-winning drama Dancing at Lughnasa. Widely regarded as Irish dramatist Brian Friel’s masterpiece, this haunting play is the author’s tribute to the spirit and valour of the past. The play won the 1992 Tony Award® for Best Play, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play, the Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Broadway Play, and was chosen by TIME Magazine as one of the ten best plays for 1991.
This extraordinary play is the story of five unmarried sisters eking out their lives in a small village in Ireland in 1936. We meet them at the time of the festival of Lughnasa, which celebrates the pagan god of the harvest with drunken revelry and dancing. Their spare existence is interrupted by brief, colorful bursts of music from the radio, their only link to the romance and hope of the world at large. The action of the play is told through the memory of the illegitimate son of one of the sisters as he remembers the five women who raised him: his mother and four maiden aunts. He is only seven in 1936, the year his elderly uncle, a priest, returns after serving for twenty-five years as a missionary in a Ugandan leper colony. For the young boy, two other disturbances occur that summer. The sisters acquire their first radio, whose music transforms them from correct Catholic women to shrieking, stomping banshees in their own kitchen. And he meets his father for the first time.
Dancing at Lughnasa runs March 13, 14, 19, 20, 21, 26, 27 & 28, 2026, at 8:00 p.m., and March 15, 2026, at 2:00 p.m. All performances are at The KordaZone Theatre, at 2520 Seminole. Tickets are available at the door an hour ahead of the show, or in advance online. Tickets are $25 for General Admission and $20 for students and seniors.
Dancing at Lughnasa was selected as part of Korda’s second public call for production proposals and is directed by Dean Valentino, who most recently directed 2025’s Murder on the Orient Express at Korda. Alex Hagen and Narvin Fazlaliserkani serve as assistant directors, with Joey Wright producing.
The talented cast includes a host of Korda regulars and new faces: Marnie Gare as Kate Mundy, Avery McMillan Thomas as Agnes Mundy, Georgie Savoie as Chris Mundy, Brandon Chappus as Gerry Evans, Joey Wright as Jack Mundy, Rebecca Lashmar as Maggie Mundy, Kory Pineau as Michael Mundy (the elder), Larissa Dawn as Rose Mundy, and Thomas Preney as Michael Mundy (the younger).
Noah Ball and Owl Foster serve as technical team leads, Jess Foster is assistant stage manager, staging and costuming is by Karen Kilbride, Georgie Savoie serves as choreographer with Kerry Ann Doherty as dance instructor, and Rebecca Lashmar is the production’s intimacy coordinator. Set design, build and construction included Valentino, Eric Tulp, Jay Stapleton, Wright, Fazlaliserkani, Foster, Sarina Alizedeh, Ball and Dayan Mohammadzadeh. Ball oversees lighting with Jess Foster operating lights, Fazlaliserkani and Valentino handled sound design. Christopher Lawrence Menard designed the production’s poster and artwork and oversees promotions, with support from Hope Forman and Abbey Lee Hallett.
