When performing-arts student Shannon Branham told her friend Thomas Quinn that she was going to write a play, Quinn suggested she write about turn-of-the-century Irish patriot Maud Gonne. Quinn figured Gonne’s life had all the makings of a good story–illegitimate children, supernatural dealings, and a 35-year relationship with poet William Butler Yeats.
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Maura, Branham’s play, is filled with stories like this. Branham, along with Quinn, Adam Meltzer, and Mike Stevenson–who together form the Medicine Wheel Theatre Company–spent about nine months researching, writing, and producing the work, which runs through February at the Rally Theatre. Branham plays Gonne; Stevenson plays Yeats.
Gonne, born in 1865, was an actress, political activist, and spitfire. She founded the nationalist Daughters of Ireland, helped organize the Irish brigades that fought against the British in the South African War, and fought for the release of Irish political prisoners. Her son, Sean MacBride, continued in her line, earning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1974 for his work as chairman of Amnesty International and with other human-rights organizations.
She and Stevenson did most of the research; he took Yeats, she took Gonne. Deciding that she needed more than just facts, Branham took a two-week trip to Ireland. “There was an atmosphere that I couldn’t get here,” she explains. She read most of Gonne’s writings at the National Library of Ireland, and met a woman who had once seen Gonne speak.
Branham prefers to call the play emotional: “If there’s a logic to it, it’s an emotional logic. It takes the journey of an emotion.”
