NY Fringe Festival Review: White Horses: An Irish Childhood

White Horses: An Irish Childhood
Presented by: Breaking Tide
Writer: Owen Dara
Director: Elizabeth Duck & Dan Toscano

Summary:
A sweet, sad and inspiring memoir of growing up in Ireland. Owen Dara uses humor, song and love to paint a picture of his boyhood in Cork, Ireland with a devout Catholic mother and a father who battles depression.

Dara spends content and happy younger years watching his father create pottery which he sells to tourists to support the family. He thrills his mother when he announces plans to enter the priesthood. All these dreams are shattered by a fallible priest and by his father loss of the pottery business and descent into depression which forces the family to live in poverty, first in rented accommodations, then in a run-down home given to them by his wealthy maternal grandfather.

As a teen, Dara rebels against the upper-class snobbery of his mother’s family and drops out of school. Years of travelling can’t put distance between him and the anger he feels for his father, and it’s only when, fighting his own depression, he returns to express his feelings to his father, that he finds peace through forgiveness.

Dara is a wonderful storyteller, playing the various roles of his parents, a school mate, the priest and himself. He draws the audience in and touches them deeply with the tales. It’s very encouraging to see an author’s view of family dysfunction filtered by love, rather than by the anger and pain it causes. The show is derived from Dara’s book of memoirs “White Horses: An Irish Childhood.” The white horses refer to a story his father told him about herds of white horses forming the white caps on ocean waves.

Highlights:
• Just the right blend of humor to balance the sadder parts
• The song he writes for his dad
• Would love to see an Off-Broadway run with a song added at the beginning and a book signing following (now I have to read the book)

Lowlights:
• None

Christians might also like to know:
• Lord’s name taken in vain

Fringe Tassels Awarded: 4.5

VENUE #7: manhattan theatre source
The run has ended.

--Lauren Yarger