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    ‘Agreement’ and ‘Philadelphia, Here I Come!,’ Two Irish Imports

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    “Agreement,” at Irish Arts Center, and “Philadelphia, Here I Come!,” at Irish Repertory Theater, have a timeless feel, rooted in their eras and resonant in ours.In more placid times, it would be downright bizarre to classify Owen McCafferty’s political drama “Agreement” as feel-good entertainment.In these fraught, belligerent times, though, there is comfort, even a twinge of hope, in the play’s retelling of the knotty negotiations that finally made an enduring peace possible in Northern Ireland. Part of the United Kingdom, it was long violently divided between Catholics and the Protestant majority, with republicans wanting the region to join the predominantly Catholic Republic of Ireland and unionists vehemently opposed. After decades of blood-soaked warring — and bitter, sectarian score-keeping about who did what to whom — the Good Friday Agreement pointed a different way forward.It sounds like the makings of theater for wonks, doesn’t it? Seven politicians holed up together in Belfast in April 1998, battling their way toward consensus as the clock ticks down. Tony Blair, the British prime minister, has a family vacation to get to in Spain, so they need to complete the deal by Thursday. In Charlotte Westenra’s impeccably acted production for Lyric Theater, Belfast, the group blows past that deadline and a delirious dream ballet erupts — all of these exhausted people suddenly dancing.“Agreement,” at Irish Arts Center in Manhattan, is generally less colorful than that, and its barrage of contentious details can be overwhelming. But really, negotiations are stuck on the same few specifics: power sharing, economic cooperation, the decommissioning of paramilitary weapons and the release of prisoners.The show’s most teasing joke is having the career pacifist John Hume (Dan Gordon), the gentlest pol in the room, ask the audience whether there’s any need for him to explain an elusive central point yet again. Whereupon he does not clarify.“You all get it, don’t you?” Hume says, moving briskly along. “And if you haven’t — pay attention!”In the rushing current of this play, what buoys us isn’t the particularities but rather the personalities. Mo Mowlam (Andrea Irvine), the flagrantly unpretentious British secretary of state for Northern Ireland and the only woman in the mix; Gerry Adams (Chris Corrigan), the leader of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, who turns out to be good for a wisecrack at a urinal; Bertie Ahern (Ronan Leahy), the Irish premier, freshly in mourning for his mother and showing up anyway — this is a charismatic bunch.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Mysterious Case of Kitsy Rainey’ Review: A Trilogy’s Bittersweet End

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      At Irish Arts Center, the actor delivers the final installment of his solo plays about the cobbler Pat and his eccentric beloved.Falling in love came as a surprise to Pat Farnon — a late-life development he hadn’t been looking for any more than he’d been looking for the marriage proposal that set that romance in motion. When a whirlwind of a woman named Kitsy Rainey asked him to marry her even though they’d never so much as dated, he acquiesced.“The most beautiful woman that ever water washed,” Pat called her, and Kitsy cherished him right back. But how well did she allow her husband to know her?In “The Mysterious Case of Kitsy Rainey,” the bittersweet final installment of Mikel Murfi’s trilogy of solo plays about the cobbler Pat and his eccentric beloved, it is 1987 and Kitsy has been dead two years. Holed up at home in their small Irish town, avoiding company, Pat gathers his courage to open a suitcase that Kitsy had forbidden him to look inside while she was alive.What he finds changes his understanding of her, and not just from the newspaper clipping suggesting her involvement in a long-ago crime, in the place where she was born and came of age. Or as their good friend Huby says, comically, after he reads the article: “It might be best, Pat, if we don’t try to put two and two together here.”Pat, though, has always had a quick and busy mind. The narrator of this play and its boisterously funny predecessors, “The Man in the Woman’s Shoes” and “I Hear You and Rejoice” (all currently running at Irish Arts Center, in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan), Pat can speak to us, the audience, inside his head, but he cannot speak in life, nor can he read.He is, however, an accomplished listener, and Murfi, the plays’ author, director and shape-shifting star, is a marvel of characterization and vocalization, his repertoire including uncanny instrumentals and animal sounds. This is what allows him to populate Pat’s world so richly.It is risky, then, for “The Mysterious Case” to spend as much time as it does with Pat in solitude, contemplating his own deterioration and intermittently listening to a cassette tape that Kitsy made for him and left in that suitcase.And as emotionally honest as it is to let us feel Kitsy’s absence, dramatically it is far less interesting to hear her recorded voice than to watch Murfi become her. When he embodies Kitsy in a memory, even fleetingly, the show zings with life.Irish Arts Center advises that each play works as a stand-alone, but that isn’t true of “The Mysterious Case,” which seems to know that, opening with a verbal montage of standout lines from the first two shows: a kind of “Previously on ‘Kitsy Rainey’” nudge to our recollection.It would be a mistake to come to this play without an existing affection for and curiosity about Kitsy. But if you have those, Murfi has answers to sate you — even as you watch Pat, in his anger and pain, try to reconcile her love with her tenacious secrecy.The Mysterious Case of Kitsy RaineyThrough Nov. 18 at Irish Arts Center, Manhattan; irishartscenter.org. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. More

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      ‘Good Vibrations’ Review: The Saving Power of Punk

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      In a big-hearted musical about a 1970s Belfast record store owner and the punk movement he nurtured, music is the real hero.On a nighttime street in 1970s Belfast, Northern Ireland, a D.J. named Terri Hooley runs into a pair of local toughs — young men who’ve found their purpose in the gunfire and explosions of a sectarian conflict pitting Protestants against Catholics.That strife defines everything around Terri, but his life’s meaning comes from music: the Hank Williams songs of his childhood; the rock and reggae that became his soundtrack later on.“Do your feet a favor,” he tells the toughs. “Take them dancing, like you used to.”Is it bad to call a punk rock musical charming? I hope not, because “Good Vibrations” — a biomusical about the real Terri Hooley, who became the idealistic, stalwart champion of Belfast’s nascent punk scene — absolutely is. Directed by Des Kennedy for the Lyric Theater, Belfast, it portrays music as a defiantly joyous refuge from ugliness and danger. Far from romanticizing mayhem, it presents Northern Irish punk as a youthful life force in opposition to it.Adapted by Colin Carberry and Glenn Patterson from their 2012 film of the same name, “Good Vibrations” (not to be confused with the Broadway jukebox musical also of the same name, set to Beach Boys tunes) transports the movie’s righteous sense of pleasure and freedom to the stage at Irish Arts Center, in Manhattan.Glen Wallace stars as Terri, a stubborn dreamer with zero business sense who opens a record shop, Good Vibrations, in Belfast’s city center — and makes a deal with fighters on both sides that they will leave him alone. Soon he’s putting out records by local punk bands, because no one else will, and promoting them to the world. His marriage to the lovely Ruth Carr (Jayne Wisener) suffers for it; his passion is consumed by the shop and the punks.Terri’s bands — Rudi, the Outcasts, the Undertones — don’t snarl in their rebellion, though. They’re sunnier than that, and so is this show. It’s also a little chaotic, as befits Terri’s life, and not always as clear as it needs to be. It could be that its creators are inhibited by the ethical obligations of telling a story inspired by real people. Still, this is a tonic of a musical.Grace Smart’s set makes clever use of instrument cases, Gillian Lennox’s period costumes are impeccable and the use of music as underscore can be hauntingly gorgeous. (The musical director is Katie Richardson.) In a cast that does a lot of doubling, Marty Maguire is a protean standout as Terri’s socialist dad and several other characters.As much as “Good Vibrations” is about Terri, its ultimate hero might be music itself, in whose saving, salving power he believes unwaveringly.“This is missionary work,” Terri says, in his D.J. days.So it is. Preach.Good VibrationsThrough July 16 at Irish Art Center, Manhattan; irishartscenter.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      A Stage Musical About Belfast’s Punk Oasis

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      Of all the streets to open a record store, one nicknamed Bomb Alley might not have been optimal. Then again this was Belfast in 1977, when the nationalistic, sectarian violence known as the Troubles made retail perilous pretty much everywhere.The situation did not deter Terri Hooley, who welcomed warring Protestants and Catholics to the shop he had optimistically called Good Vibrations.“It was like a little oasis in a sea of madness,” Hooley, 74, said in a recent video conversation from Belfast.The story of a lone man bridging warring communities is the kind of feel-good tale you can easily imagine as a movie, and lo and behold, it became one: “Good Vibrations” (2012), starring Richard Dormer (“Game of Thrones,” “Fortitude”) as Hooley. Colin Carberry and Glenn Patterson then adapted their own screenplay into a stage musical for Belfast’s Lyric Theater, whose most recent production of the show is running at the Irish Arts Center in Manhattan until July 16.The show, in which members of the cast take turns playing in the onstage band, follows the odyssey of Hooley (played by Glen Wallace) as he started the shop then a label that released early singles by the Undertones and the Outcasts. It also portrays the toll his obsession took on his marriage to the poet Ruth Carr (Jayne Wisener).“It actually helps you understand what Northern Ireland is now, what Northern Ireland had been,” the musical’s director, Des Kennedy, said. “It’s a real snapshot of that conflict without being about the conflict.”Hooley discovered the power of music at a young age. “My history starts in 1965 in the Maritime Hotel with Van Morrison and Them,” he said, mentioning one of the biggest stars to ever come out of Northern Ireland. “The ’60s were very colorful for me. Then the Troubles came, and the 1970s were black and white, and horrific.”Glen Wallace, center, as Terri Hooley in the musical “Good Vibrations” at the Irish Arts Center in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHis solution was to create a place that would welcome all. “Terri is a true radical,” Patterson said via video from Belfast. “He really believes in the power of transformation, about betterment, about enjoyment, about living to your full potential.”Hooley, a fan of Hank Williams and the Shangri-Las, was at first confounded by punk, but he quickly embraced the scene, which was blowing up in Belfast just as it was in London or New York.The movement, however, had a different resonance in Northern Ireland.“So much of the emphasis then was on what you couldn’t do,” Carberry said of Belfast in a joint chat with Patterson. “You can’t go to that school, you can’t live on that street, you can’t support that football team, you can’t have that friend, you can’t go out with that person — it was all about narrowing options.“Punk music,” he continued, “was about opening up options: Expand your record collection, expand your group of friends and ultimately expand how you look at the world.”Eventually, Hooley decided to expand beyond the store. Remembering great Northern Irish bands in the 1960s who had never made it to the studio, he didn’t want the new generation to be similarly erased.So he started the Good Vibrations label to help preserve the legacy of bands like the Outcasts, Rudi, Protex and most notably the Undertones, who were based 70 miles away in Derry. A couple of the best scenes in “Good Vibrations” actually revolve around the Undertones’ “Teenage Kicks,” which was so clearly an instant classic that the taste-making BBC DJ John Peel played it twice in a row during a 1978 broadcast.A scene from the film “Good Vibrations,” with Richard Dormer, right, as Terri Hooley.Cinematic Collection /Alamy Stock PhotoLike many of the Northern Irish punk songs, “Teenage Kicks” celebrated the headiness of being young, rather than spewing out bile: Those kids didn’t have to sing about aggression — they were living it.“Across the years, people were trying to avoid talking about politics in Northern Ireland,” said the show’s music director, Katie Richardson, who is 34. “Young people were like, ‘We’re sick of this, we want to talk about love, we want to talk about the positive things.’ For me and my generation of musicians, it was the same: Nobody wanted to talk about the Troubles.”Not that love was doing all that great in Hooley’s own home: His passion for music came at a cost to his relationship with Ruth. “The night that Terri’s first daughter was born, he wasn’t at the hospital; he was at a Siouxsie Sioux gig in Belfast, hanging out backstage,” Kennedy said. The show does find a bit more room for Ruth as a poet, and for the couple’s friends Dave and Marilyn Hyndman (Darren Franklin and Cat Barter).As Northern Ireland recently celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement that ended the Troubles, Carberry noted that the commemorations largely focused on the leaders at the negotiation table, to the detriment of the groups and individuals who had tried so hard to make a difference on a smaller scale.“In a way, ‘Good Vibrations’ is a celebration of those people,” Carberry said. “This is a story about ordinary people who tried to live a different way, and tried to help others live a different way.” More

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      ‘Chekhov’s First Play’ Review: A Play-by-Play of the Play Within the Play

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      At Irish Arts Center, a wry, experimental iteration doesn’t do much to untangle the playwright’s unwieldy early work.If Anton Chekhov gave a name to the early play that surfaced years after his death, we don’t know what it was. This is part of the lore around that script, a relished detail in the story of its discovery: The title page was missing.The text is a mammoth, unwieldy beast, as playwrights’ juvenilia often is. Written when Chekhov was 18, or 19, or 20 — that fact is uncertain, too — it’s a stylistic mishmash that would run five or six hours, staged whole. But dramatists are drawn to it, in part because its elements are recognizable from his later work: the grand old estate, the money woes, the crowd of characters living restless, listless lives. And, of course, the gun.So adapters dive in, gather what they like and leave the rest. Michael Frayn called his rendition “Wild Honey.” David Hare’s is “Platonov,” which is the usual title for the play in English. And if you remember the amusing spectacle of Cate Blanchett, on Broadway nearly six years ago, removing her bra without taking off her dress — well, then you’ve seen the version known as “The Present,” by Andrew Upton.“Chekhov’s First Play,” at the Irish Arts Center in Hell’s Kitchen, is Bush Moukarzel and Ben Kidd’s wry, experimental iteration. Directed by the pair for Dead Centre — their Dublin company, familiar to New York audiences for the shows “Lippy” and “Hamnet” — it whittles Chekhov’s script down to a bare 70 minutes. That includes time for the location to shift from the late 19th-century Russian countryside to early 21st-century Dublin, and for a wrecking ball and a pneumatic drill to do some damage to Andrew Clancy’s scenery.Languor escalates into havoc for the characters — among them Anna (Ali White), the financially indebted owner of a house she can’t afford; her friend Triletsky (Paul Reid), who, like Chekhov, is a doctor with tuberculosis that he fails to diagnose; and Platonov, who arrives quite late, played by an audience member. Not that you are likely to care much about the characters, let alone the plot, as story is not exactly at the forefront here. The performance we watch is, in a sense, the play within the play.The whole experience is framed by Moukarzel’s running commentary, spoken into audience members’ ears via the headphones we wear throughout. (Sound design is by Jimmy Eadie and Kevin Gleeson.) It’s funny and often snarky; in one slightly crude line, Moukarzel sounds like a sports broadcaster giving a play-by-play of a rare Chekhov move. But Moukarzel also expounds on the themes of the play — like private property and the ravenousness of the rich — and laments that he cut so many characters from Chekhov’s script.“It was hard to decide what matters,” he says, “and who you can just throw away.”This, really, is the nub of “Chekhov’s First Play,” which had its premiere in 2015. That’s also when Irish artists were sifting through the human wreckage of the Celtic Tiger, an economic boom that collapsed into painful recession and left Ireland littered with abandoned housing developments.When these characters talk of cancer, it’s a metaphor for harmful, unchecked growth; their scorn for banks is rooted in reckless lending that ruined lives. Even Moukarzel and Kidd’s decision not to give the Chekhov play a proper title is significant — because of that other meaning of title: legal ownership. Historically, one name for the found Chekhov text has been “Play Without a Title.”Trouble is, the Celtic Tiger is so many crises removed from the present that it’s a little obscure, even at the Irish Arts Center, which co-commissioned the play.Similarly, the headphones would have been novel in 2015 — the year that downtown theatergoers experienced Anne Washburn’s “10 out of 12” that way, and the year before Simon McBurney’s “The Encounter” gobsmacked headphone-wearing Broadway audiences with its binaural sound design. Now, as a tool, they’re underwhelming.“Chekhov’s First Play” surely felt much bolder and fresher when it was new. But if you ask the question “Why this show now?” the answer seems to be that it was in the wings.Chekhov’s First PlayThrough Nov. 6 at the Irish Arts Center, Manhattan; irishartscenter.org. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. More

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      Live Performance Is Back. But Audiences Have Been Slow to Return.

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      Attendance lagged in the comeback season, as the challenges posed by the coronavirus persisted. Presenters hope it was just a blip.Patti LuPone, Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig came back to Broadway. The Norwegian diva-in-the-making Lise Davidsen brought her penetrating voice to the Metropolitan Opera. Dancers filled stages, symphonies reverberated in concert halls and international theater companies returned to American stages.The resumption of live performance after the long pandemic shutdown brought plenty to cheer about over the past year. But far fewer people are showing up to join those cheers than presenters had hoped.Around New York, and across the country, audiences remain well below prepandemic levels. From regional theaters to Broadway, and from local orchestras to grand opera houses, performing arts organizations are reporting persistent — and worrisome — drops in attendance.Fewer than half as many people saw a Broadway show during the season that recently ended than did so during the last full season before the coronavirus pandemic. The Met Opera saw its paid attendance fall to 61 percent of capacity, down from 75 percent before the pandemic. Many regional theaters say ticket sales are down significantly.“There was a greater magnetic force of people’s couches than I, as a producer, anticipated,” said Jeremy Blocker, the managing director at New York Theater Workshop, the Off Broadway theater that developed “Rent” and “Hadestown.” “People got used to not going places during the pandemic, and we’re going to struggle with that for a few years.”Many presenters anticipate that the softer box office will extend into the upcoming season and perhaps beyond. And some fear that the virus is accelerating long-term trends that have troubled arts organizations for years, including softer ticket sales for many classical music events, the decline of the subscription model for selling tickets at many performing arts organizations, and the increasing tendency among consumers to purchase tickets at the last minute.A few institutions are already making adjustments for the new season: The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra has cut 10 concerts, after seeing its average attendance fall to 40 percent of capacity last season, down from 62 percent in 2018-19.Many Broadway shows have struggled to match prepandemic salesPercent change in weekly gross sales in 2021 and 2022, compared with the same week in 2019 More

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      ‘The Same’ Review: Do You See What I See?

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      Enda Walsh’s play, which had its U.S. premiere at the Irish Arts Center, stars two sisters who play different versions of the same character.Imagine that on one otherwise normal day, while going about your normal activities, you encounter someone who looks uncannily familiar — it’s you. Does the discovery cause you discomfort or give you relief? Are you met with assurance or fear?It’s the situation a woman named Lisa — well, two women named Lisa — face in “The Same,” by Enda Walsh, that opened on Sunday for its U.S. premiere, at the Irish Arts Center in Manhattan.The Corcadorca Theater Company production stars Catherine Walsh and Eileen Walsh, who are sisters in real life (with no relation to Enda Walsh), as two expressions of Lisa. The younger Lisa recounts her recent arrival to a new city and what is presumably a mental health facility. She occasionally leaves her “small blue room,” as she calls it, for errands or groceries or, on one particular day, to take a job helping prepare for a repast after a funeral. There she meets the woman who shares her face and her memories: her future self.The two Lisas sit, stand and pace, reminiscing about their childhood. They speak in a steady back-and-forth, trading lines and swapping roles in what feels less like a conversation than a team recitation of a story they both know by heart. Their dialogue reflects a constantly changing perspective; sometimes they speak in the first person, sometimes the second, sometimes the third, as though each Lisa is, even individually, too fragmented to maintain a consistent point of view.The production, directed by Pat Kiernan, runs a trim 50 minutes, less than the time it takes to get from some corners of Brooklyn to the Irish Arts Center’s swanky new Midtown location on 11th Avenue.The set design, by Owen Boss, is immersive. It feels like a waiting room; the audience sits in upholstered chairs and love seats arranged in a loose square on a patch of carpet, giving a sense of the contours of a room. There’s a bookcase, a potted plant, and around and alongside the seats are signs of interrupted progress: tables cluttered with half-empty mugs of coffee and half-eaten cookies and an unfinished game of solitaire. The seating faces the center of the space, where the two actors spend most of the play. It’s novel to sit among the action, with one Lisa or another shuffling past your seat, though ultimately the effect doesn’t support its execution.Kiernan’s direction, however, imbues the production with an unsettling feeling: The actresses mirror each other in ways that aren’t always exact replications but rather variations on themes. And so there’s an interplay among their postures, movements and energies — younger Lisa gets worked up and older Lisa is calm, until she, too, gets worked up and younger Lisa becomes subdued. Michael Hurley’s lighting design and Peter Power’s sound design also seem triggered by the volatility of the Lisas’ minds. Kiernan has some of the set’s effects suddenly spring to life — two TV sets suspended in the corners of the room awaken to show clips from a game show or an episode of “Judge Judy,” a bingo machine whirs to life and then chaotically spews its contents on the floor.The success of the play’s Gemini effect is in large part because of the actresses’ talents. Eileen’s performance is jittery, her version of Lisa so full of neuroses that she seems like a shaken can of soda, fizzing just beneath the surface. Catherine gives off a similar, though more muted, anxiety; her Lisa embodies a different type of pressure, one of a dam carefully constructed over the years, pushing back against the waves crashing against its walls.Walsh’s script, however, doesn’t leave as lasting an impression. The play, which was originally commissioned by Corcadorca in celebration of the company’s 25th anniversary, has the usual signatures of the playwright, whose most recent New York production was the arresting “Medicine,” starring Domhnall Gleeson, at St. Ann’s Warehouse. There’s an intentional obliqueness, the traces of a narrative that are blurred and contorted by the characters. It all comes back to the slippery nature of the playwright’s language, which is full of repetition and half-formed ideas; sentences have some unspoken antecedent or trail off, spiraling inward to form an ouroboros of thoughts.But Walsh typically uses those linguistic maneuvers to add more shades to his text; rarely is he interested in a singular theme or mode of storytelling. Here, the short run time prevents him from getting too complicated, but the result is a script that, though still unconventional, is limited.How does a person grow from trauma? What happens when she resolves to leave part of herself behind, only to re-encounter that part unexpectedly? “The Same” circles these questions but never reaches a sharp point. It’s almost as though the play gets trapped simply gazing in the mirror.The SameThrough March 6 at the Irish Arts Center, Manhattan; irishartscenter.org. Running time: 50 minutes. More

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      New York’s Irish Arts Center Upgrades to a ‘Flagship Hub’

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      Irish Arts Center, a New York nonprofit devoted to championing the culture of Ireland and Irish Americans, is finally moving into a home as big as its aspirations.The organization, founded in the East Village in 1972, has been operating for decades out of a onetime tenement in Hell’s Kitchen. Now, wrapping up a pandemic-delayed construction project first set in motion 15 years ago, the center is moving just around the corner after converting a longtime tire shop into a state-of-the-art performance facility where it aims, starting in December, to present theater, dance, music, visual art and more.Ireland “still has these incredibly deep roots to its own artistic legacy, and it still fundamentally feels like a land of poets in its sensibility and its storytelling,” said Aidan Connolly, the center’s executive director. But, he added, “New Yorkers might not know how exciting the emerging contemporary dance scene in Ireland is; they might not know how Ireland’s cultural evolution in the last 20 years has yielded an exciting, dynamic, more diverse generation of musical artists, and on and on.”The centerpiece of the new building is a flexible theater space that can seat up to 199 people.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesFabric banners and black curtains can be used for acoustic purposes, modifying the way sound is heard in the theater.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThe theater’s walls are covered in red oak plywood panels that have been stained and textured.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThe four-story, 21,700-square-foot building on 11th Avenue, which retains its original brick repair shop facade, houses, at its center, a black box theater space that has 14 approved configurations, the largest of which will seat 199 people. The theater is a major technological upgrade for the center, with retractable seating, flexible lighting, sound, and set rigging, an overhead wire tension grid and the capacity for digital capture and streaming.On the ground floor, the building has a cafe, with blackened steel panels and a walnut bar, which will be run by Ardesia, a local wine bar. And above and below the theater are rooms that can be used for educational and community programs, as well as rehearsals and meetings.The $60 million building was designed by Davis Brody Bond, a New York-based architecture firm, in consultation with Ireland’s state architect. There are nods both to the industrial history of Hell’s Kitchen, and the Irish mission of the center — lots of brick and steel, and also lots of places to sit and talk, because the center sees hospitality as an Irish virtue.Irish Arts Center is led by the executive director Aidan Connolly, center, along with Rachael Gilkey, left, its programming director, and Pauline Turley, the vice chair.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThere are Irish touches throughout the building — most conspicuously, the main stairway will feature lines of Irish poetry on the risers, but also the signs throughout the building are in Irish as well as English, in a font created in collaboration with the Irish typographer Bobby Tannam. Much of the furniture is from an Irish craft furniture designer, Orior, which makes pieces “injected with Irish character.”The center plans to keep its offices in its existing building, on West 51st Street; at some point, it plans to redo that building and resume using its 99-seat auditorium for smaller-scale performances. Cybert Tire, which previously occupied the 11th Avenue site, by the way, still exists — founded in 1916, it claims to be the city’s oldest tire shop, and has simply moved around the corner, onto West 52nd Street.Irish Arts Center began its life as an Off Off Broadway theater that produced its own work, but over the last 15 years it has embraced a broader portfolio; Connolly often says he likes to think of the center’s programming as a hybrid of the 92nd Street Y and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Irish culture is represented in New York in any variety of ways — there are periodically Irish writers on Broadway, for example, and the Irish Repertory Theater presents often acclaimed productions of Irish drama, but Connolly argues that, until now, there has been “no flagship hub to celebrate and promote Irish culture in a way that is commensurate with its impact,” akin to institutions like the French Institute Alliance Française or Scandinavia House.The organization remains modestly sized, at least by the scale of New York City nonprofits, with an anticipated $7 million budget for its first year in the new building. But it has been growing at a steady clip — its operating budget was only $690,000 in 2006-07.Above the theater is a wire tension grid for lighting, sound and other technical equipment.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThe lighting is meant to be easily adjustable.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThe building also has infrastructure to allow video capture, broadcast and streaming.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesIn a demonstration of the expanded work made possible by the new theater, the center plans next summer to stage its first musical, an adaptation of the 2012 film “Good Vibrations,” about the Belfast punk rock scene. The first year will also include a production of “The Same,” a play by Enda Walsh about two women in a psychiatric institution, and “Chekhov’s First Play,” via Dead Centre, an Irish/English theater company.The center will open with a monthlong run by the Irish-French cabaret singer Camille O’Sullivan, who said she would fondly remember the old building, where she performed several times.“They’re family, and they’re friends,” O’Sullivan said, “and they’re very much giving a home to people like myself.”There will also be dance programs from Oona Doherty; Mufutau Yusuf; and Sean Curran with Darrah Carr. And there will be an array of music, poetry, readings and visual art.There are 31.5 million Americans of Irish ancestry, but the center has a broad view of Irishness, and although its donor base is made up primarily of Irish Americans, its audience is varied.The theater retained the brick facade of the tire shop that previously occupied the site. Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesMiranda Driscoll, an Irish curator, arranged an opening exhibition of visual art for the building.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThe structure’s building materials are primarily wood, brick, glass and steel.Vincent Tullo for The New York Times“They have a really inclusive way of thinking about the culture of the Irish diaspora,” said Georgiana Pickett, an arts consultant who staged several collaborations with the center when she was executive director of the Baryshnikov Arts Center. “They’ve done a lot to ensure that they’re linking the histories of the arts that come through Ireland to many other places in the world, and that’s allowed them to include Appalachian music, new immigrant communities in Ireland, people of Irish descent that collaborate with other cultures — it’s the Irish Arts Center, but has a really diverse definition of what that means.”The project is primarily funded by government largess in both the United States and Ireland — New York City, which has supported multiple arts institutions over time, set aside $37 million for the project.“This amazing building is so timely,” said Gonzalo Casals, the city’s cultural affairs commissioner, “because it brings down the barriers among disciplines, and offers an in-depth understanding of Irish culture.”The Irish government contributed $9 million, and the state of New York gave $5 million. Private donors contributed $15 million. That’s $66 million raised thus far — the money not spent on the new building will be used in part to support the operating budget.The Irish government continues to support the center through Culture Ireland, which promotes Irish culture around the world as part of an effort announced in 2018 to double the country’s global footprint. Irish Arts Center has been a significant beneficiary of that effort; Christine Sisk, the director of Culture Ireland, said her agency is making a “big investment” in the center.“New York is an amazing city for the arts, and we also see it as a gateway to the rest of the U.S.,” said Sisk, who said she expected that Irish artists whose work is presented at the center could then more easily tour the United States. “It’s a shop window, and a guaranteed space, to present Irish arts.” More