Studio Series - Stones In His Pockets

The Story

September 11 - 16

Marie Jones’ Stones In His Pockets started with only two actors playing all 15 roles in the play out of economic necessity. Thirteen years since Stones’ budget first run in Belfast – and since winning many of Ireland’s and Britain’s top theatre awards, being nominated for three Tonys and ruling London’s West End for five years – the money is certainly there to hire additional actors, but the idea of ever doing so is long gone.

Stones brings a Hollywood film crew to a village in Ireland’s County Kerry to shoot a blarney-filled major motion picture. The film’s director might not find the area’s cows looking “Irish enough,” but decides to stay and film anyway, hiring locals as extras. Stones follows two of these extras, Charlie Conlon and Jake Quinn, with the actors who play these underemployed 30-somethings also playing the film’s starlet, the film’s director, a voice coach, a priest, a security guard, and several more characters hard to keep track of on paper but easily discernable through the actors’ changes in voice and mannerism. It’s part comedy, part an exercise in physical endurance for the actors and part warning to not get carried away by pipe dreams. (We’ll also warn audiences this play uses strong adult language.)

Belfast-born Jones didn’t just dream up Stones out of nowhere. An actress in addition to a playwright -- Jones played Daniel Day-Lewis’ mother in the movie In the Name of the Father -- she has seen firsthand what the Hollywood glitz and glamour machine can do to the small towns it invades. She swears Stones isn’t meant to spear a particular real-life movie or star.