NORTH SALEM, N.Y. - The Schoolhouse Theater’s first offering of its 2026 season is Outside Mullingar, a modern Irish romcom that’s sentimental without being saccharine and laugh-out-loud funny while still holding space for dark reflections and a few tears.
Written by Pulitzer Prize and Academy Award winner John Patrick Shanley, who’s best known as the screenwriter of the movie Moonstruck, the play is set in rural Ireland where two middle-aged lifelong neighbors -- an introverted Anthony Reilly and a tenacious Rosemary Muldoon, literally fight their way to love.
The plot hinges on a long-standing land feud and a threatened disinheritance which finally goads Rosemary, who’s been secretly crushing on Anthony since they were kids, into taking action.
Directing is Bram Lewis. The play opens at the Croton Falls venue – Westchester’s oldest professional theater and an intimate 99-seat space -- on Friday, May 15, and runs through Sunday, May 31.
This year, for the first time, TST’s season is being fully underwritten – by US Alliance- a credit union formed by IBM, Marriott International, American Express, and Pepsi.
The financial support is a godsend, said Lewis, adding: “It will keep our home fires burning.”
Lewis, TST’s producing director, and its artistic director, Owen Thompson, are also very grateful to the Town of North Salem for allowing TST to remain at 3 Owens Road, where it had been since being founded by late local resident and artist Lee Pope in 1983.
(The town purchased the circa-1926 former school building in 2021 and transformed it into a community center.)
Lewis also praised the town’s superintendent of recreation, Lauren Rosasco, and her staff for their assistance and support.
Like Moonstruck, Outside Mullingar, is a vehicle for Shanley’s “unmistakable gift for finding comedy in human awkwardness and longing,” said Lewis and Thompson.
It debuted on Broadway in 2014 and was a Tony Award nominee for Best Play and was later adapted into the 2020 film Wild Mountain Thyme.
For his play, Doubt, Shanley received both the 2005 Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
The standout Equity cast in the TST’s production includes Dana Watkins as Anthony, Thea McCartan as Rosemary, Michael Daly as Tony, Anthony’s father; and Carole Monferdini as Aoife, Rosemary’s mother.
According to Lewis and Thompson, Daly is returning to TST’s stage after his acclaimed 2024 performance in Brian Friel's Faith Healer, a four-monologue play that explores the life, memories, and seemingly mysterious powers of Francis Hardy, a traveling faith healer plying forgotten corners of the British Isles.
Daly is bringing, Lewis and Thompson said, “his trademark whimsy and grounded intensity to the role of Tony” and captures “both the character’s comedic bluster and emotional depth.”
McCartan, for her part, displays a “vibrant presence” and an “impeccable comic timing” that make her character “a force of nature – funny, fierce, and impossible to ignore,” they said.
She “infuses Aoife with wit and authority, while Dana Watkins lends warmth and charm to Anthony,” Lewis and Thompson said.
In 2019, Monferdini played Mother Superior in TST’s production of Jesse Kornbluth’s The Color of Light, a play about the love between artist Henri Matisse and a young nursing student. Their relationship inspired his final work, the Chapelle du Rosaire in Vence, France.
The plays that they choose to put on in a particular season always strive to “strike a balance” between what the two want to see and what they think the audience wants to see, Thompson said.
“Considering the current state of the world, we wanted to give the audience something warm,” he explained, adding that “art is for connection, not consumption.”
“We have a season we think is built to rock the people who are sitting there with a one-of-a-kind theater experience,” said Lewis, pointing out that TST offers Broadway-level entertainment at a “fraction of the price.”
Neither one makes light of the fact that TST not only survived – through online productions put on by The Pandemic Players during the COVID-19 crisis – but continues to thrive.
“We’re pinching ourselves at the end of every production,” Lewis said.
Outside Mullingar explores themes of love, land, legacy, and the quirks of rural life, the last of which is very familiar to Lewis, he recently told Halston Media.
He was raised on a dairy farm in Lebanon, Ohio, was bitten by the acting bug very early, and moved at age nine with his theater-loving mother to New York City. Thompson grew up in a theater family that went back generations.
COMING UP
In August, TST will put on Timeless Songwriters, a concert by guitarist/vocalist Peter Calo and singer/songwriter Anne Carpenter featuring the music of Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, Carly Simon, and James Taylor.
Calo has been Simon’s guitar player, backing vocalist, musical director, and occasional producer and song collaborator for more than 20 years. He’s worked with artists such as Dionne Warwick, Willie Nelson, Leonard Bernstein, and Andrea Bocelli.
Carpenter, a presence in the New York music arena for the past decade, has had her songs recorded by Sloan Wainwright and KJ Denhert.
In September, TST will present Noël Coward’s Private Lives, a 1930 comedy that follows divorced couple Elyot and Amanda who, while on their honeymoons with new spouses Sibyl and Victor, find themselves in adjacent hotel rooms in France.
After discovering that they still have the hots for each, Elyot and Amanda run off together. But trouble soon returns to paradise.
Love-hate relationships are explored again in December when TST puts on The Lion in Winter, a classic play by James Goldman about King Henry II and his imprisoned wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, during the Christmas of 1183.
Their three sons are at each other’s throats as they vie for the throne.
The play, like Outside Mullingar, is known for its sparkling dialogue and its melding of comedy and drama.
It premiered in 1966 and was adapted into the 1968 film that starred Peter O’Toole and Katherine Hepburn. Goldman won an Academy Award for the film’s screenplay.
GOOD TO KNOW
The Schoolhouse Theater is located at 3 Owens Road, Croton Falls (a hamlet in the Town of North Salem), N.Y.
For tickets visit www.theschoolhousetheater.org or call (914) 473-7111.
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