Hunger Road

During their troupe's 160th stage production of The Great Irish Famine, the exhausted Ghost Actors of a long dead Irish tenant village find little inspiration in playing their too familiar characters in an inescapable tragedy. For the sake of Una Mac Cormaic, a visionary little girl who must make her stage debut, they begin to reject their old roles, in hope of a different outcome. Moving in a simple playing area divided into two, the Mac Cormaic Family Cottage, which sometimes doubles as the Farmer's and the Landlord's Dining Rooms, and the Imaginary World of Una Mac Cormaic, six actors unravel and reweave a tale of innocence, broken hopes, sacrifice and sorrow. Based on Tester's novella Hunger Road, this three-act stage play brings that original narrative more fully and more darkly to life, a tragicomedy woven, through the desperate Ghost Actors' anachronistic microphone and their ultimate discovery of an Audience, into the life of our own time. Hunger Road: A Stage Play of the Irish Famine is, like Tester's two other Irish-themed works about the Famine, marked by what has been described as "her own fierce brand of magical realism" and "a rich vein of life-giving green."