November 15, 1971

The celebrated Irish actress, Siobhán McKenna, brought her one-woman show Here Are Ladies (1970) to the Chapel. Writing in The New York Times during the show’s earlier run at the Public Theater in New York City, critic Clive Barnes said, “Miss McKenna offers almost every shade of Ireland except English-blue and leprechaun-green. She fights shy of the fey, and she loves the women of Ireland and forgives the men for writing of them.”

The Vassar show, a “two and a half hour solo tour de force,” said Jo Gates ’72 in The Miscellany News, “composed of a wide variety of selections from women in Irish literature…ranged from Synge and O’Casey to Shaw, Yeats and finally to entire second act of James Joyce…. It was Joyce’s Molly Bloom of the final scene from Ulysses which was the climax of the evening. With everything preceding it acted in front of a scantily suggestive set, the staging of “Molly” in her brass bed had the perfect impact.”