Two Plays for Dancers
1921
Two radical experiments in theatrical ritual, these plays find Yeats weaving Irish myth, national trauma, and mystical vision into something unlike anything else in English drama. "The Dreaming of the Bones" places a young fugitive from the Easter Rising face to face with the ghosts of Dermot and Dervorgilla, their ancient elopement still poisoning the present. It's a haunting meditation on guilt, historical memory, and whether the dead can ever truly be buried. "The Only Jealousy of Emer" strips the legend of Cuchulain down to its emotional core: a warrior torn between his wife and a younger woman, his jealousy becomes a kind of madness, a surrender to forces beyond rational choice. Yeats draws on Japanese Noh theater, on dance and music and verse, to create drama as ritual, as dream, as transformation. These are not conventional plays. They are incantations, meant to be felt as much as understood. For readers who crave theater that challenges, disturbs, and lingers.
