Juxtaposed against the contemporary drug-fueled club scene in Dublin, In Pigeon Houseweaves together vaudeville, music hall, and cinema in this love letter to traveling shows. Moving between time and genres, the itinerant players Basher, Masher, Rasher and Dolly rip up the stage with a furious tornado of language and moving pictures. A startlingly theatrical and darkly comic oeuvre, In Pigeon House at once explodes and upholds the romantic myth of the traveling show.

In Pigeon House owes its inspiration to the "fit-ups," traveling shows that toured Ireland's countryside in the first half of the twentieth century. Farmers and villagers "starved for a bit of culture" prized the indigenous touring companies from whose talented and highly accomplished ranks emerged such actors as Cyril Cusack and Milo O'Shea. John Molloy, Honor's father, began his own career in the fit-ups before moving on to star in Ireland's first soap opera, Tolka Row.

Black & White photos: Donny Smutz
Color photos: Eileen Molony

"Mossman is especially enthralling as the kind of lascivious, Carn-Evil sideshow barker who invites you to step behind a scrim for a taste of hedonistic hell." -Tony Frankel, Stage and Cinema

"Its four players ... charge from scene to scene, seamlessly transitioning from the exaggerated, witty repartee of vaudeville players, to overdramatic silent film, to gorgeously delivered monologues. Aspiration, love, heartbreak, and bitter disappointment are played as broadly one moment as they are with deep sensitivity the next, with equal success." -Joy Campbell, Chicago Theater Beat

"A multilayered history of the invariably rough-and-tumble, penniless and often brutal existence of itinerant Anglo-Irish performers throughout the 20th century, its quartet of time-shifting characters moves from squalid bedsits to the stage and screen." -Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun-Times