Even if none of the actors were wearing green, Thursday's performance of "Irish Voices on the Minnesota Prairie" was a most appropriate play for St. Patrick's Day in Minnesota.
And it was standing room only at the Carlton County Historical Society museum for the debut performance of what writer Séamas Cain calls a "documentary drama."
Cain - possibly Cloquet's only fluent speaker of Irish Gaelic - began the performance by greeting the audience in Gaelic.
"Today we will discuss the Irish colonies on the western prairies of Minnesota," Cain said. "Three of my grandparents were children in those colonies."
Several of the 20 or so students from Queen of Peace seated at the feet of the actors were the same age Cain was when he started taking notes while his grandparents swapped stories around the kitchen table. He was also a student at Queen of Peace when he began writing his notes; however, he didn't write the historical drama until last year.
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"No one read my stories, they were completely secret," Cain told the audience after the performance. "I kept these notebooks for many years, then last year when I was invited to IMRAM [an Irish language literature festival in Dublin], I was trying to figure out what to do and I took out these old notebooks."
Cain went far beyond his grandparents' lives in the drama, which included details from the lives of dozens of early settlers, some of them spoken by the actors, others detailed by Cain at the start of each act.
After he set the historical and political scene for the different eras of Irish immigration, local actors assumed the voices of various Irish settlers, from Cain's great-grandfather Pádraig Ó hAndradháin - who was involved in the pursuit of Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce tribe - to Leonard B. Hodges' investigation of the Connemara settlers, who were woefully unprepared for their first winter in Minnesota.
Hodges counted 137 children at the settlement, many of them barefoot and dressed in one layer of clothes, in shanties that were also not suitable for the weather.
"Not everyone died, but utopia, well ..." Cain's voice trailed off.
The local actors included Margaret Webster, Robert Tatro, Lyn Sandness, Donald J. Pearce, Cheryl Kramer-Milder, Rick Breuer, Deb Bahen and Jill Hoffman.
