It’s Ohio, 1916 and five ragtag outlaws from the American melting pot are being led by Irish expatriate, Trooper O’Hara, toward a huge payoff from a gold train. But first Trooper will lead them through the town of White Woman Street for replenishment and unbeknownst to them a meeting in a brothel to which destiny drags Trooper to face events haunting him from the past.
Jason Zinoman from The New York Times wrote this about a 2010 production of this play at the Irish Rep in New York City:
“Staging a sweeping and earnest western about a larger-than-life outlaw in a small Off Broadway theater could seem like a joke, like putting John Wayne in a puppet show. yet if any writer could pull this off, it might be Sebastian Barry, the most overlooked of the great living Irish dramatists, whose lyrical prose, ghostly and muscular with flashes of the sublime, can sound the way the terrain of the Wild West looks.”
He continues
“The words here stick in your mind, like an old country song or a terrible crime committed long ago.”
Barbara and Scott Siegel wrote about the play at TheaterMania.com,
“… there are scenes that suddenly come alive with white-hot intensity.”
and also
“The best scenes in the play are the quieter moments of contemplation and memory that are, in their deeply personal ways, utterly universal.”
Sam Juliano at Wonders in the Dark writes
presented by Milwaukee Irish Arts, May 2012 