February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
“The fire captain [on whose story it’s also based] had been very nervous about seeing the play for himself and I guess six or eight months went by and he kept hearing about it from people, but he said, ‘I don’t want to see it in New York because I know people in New York.’ So, I said, ‘They’re going to do it in Ireland’ and he said, ‘I don’t know anyone in Ireland.’ So, he came incognito. Nobody knew who he was. He sat next to
me at the performance at the Abbey Theater, which is the great national
theater of Ireland, and there was a standing ovation and afterwards we did a
question and answer with the audience and I could go up and say, ‘Look, so
much of this play is embodying [the fire captain’s] spirit and his way of
expressing, so I really consider a lot of this ovation to belong to him and,
of course, he was the only one who knew he was there. So, it was an amazing
experience.”