Tuesday Sept 30, 2025 at 7pm

Westbeth Community Room
155 Bank St
(enter through courtyard)
New York, NY 10014

WARC Literary Arts presents:
The Cat and the Moon by W.B. Yeats
Directed by Alison Armstrong

Cast:
Terence Burk: Blind Man
Dennis Fitzpatrick: Lame Man
Beth Griffith: First Musician
Susan Hyman: Second Musician
Alison Armstrong: Third Musician
Saint Colman: Himself

Masks by Casey Compton & Ralph Lee
Flute music: from Moore’s Irish Melodies

Notes from Alison Armstrong
Imagine a country road in the West of Ireland. County Mayo perhaps. We observe a pair
of elderly tramps, the Blind Man who carries the Lame Man on his back for forty years. They
have wandered the country roads of the west of Ireland searching for Saint Colman’s Holy Well,
where they may be healed or blessed.
We hear a tension between the two old men who cannot live without one another and yet
cannot live happily in their codependence. We realize that they evoke any number of
codependent pairings—married couples, children and parents, warring brothers such as Jacob
and Esau, Samuel Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon, or Hamm and Clov. Thus this simple story
of comic irony appeals to the archetype that most of us experience in our own lives.
Yeats’s stagecraft was influenced not only by the classical Greeks but also in certain cases
by the Japanese forms of Noh and Kyogen that combine the irony of inevitable absurdity and
profound suffering, despair and hope, rancor and forgiveness.