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BLOOMSDAY 2025 - CELEBRATING JAMES JOYCE'S BOOK ULYSSES - JUNE 12, JUNE 14 & JUNE 16 - ALL FREE!
When inviting us to perform at a Joycean event at Boston College’s Irish Studies Program in 2010, Professor Joe Nugent pointed out that our group needed a name. Donal O’Sullivan proposed “The Here Comes Everybody Players” (more recently abbreviated to Here Comes Everybody or HCE). The name appealed to us because, not only did it connect to Finnegans Wake and James Joyce, but it also signified our interest in audience engagement and inclusion of all in our work.
We were invited back to Boston College in the following years for many Joyce conferences and in 2022 for a conference on the work of Flann O’Brien. The experience of performing at academic conferences led to other performances for academia including the Modernist Studies Conference in Boston (2015); Joyce conferences in Toronto (2017), Antwerp (2018) and Trieste (2021, via Zoom).
We also began branching out and performing works by other Irish authors and playwrights including Augusta Lady Gregory, WB Yeats, Samuel Beckett, Flann O’Brien, Mark O'Rowe, Mary Manning, Deirdre Kinahan and Nancy Harris. In 2016, we were invited to perform at the first Lit Crawl Boston in the Back Bay and have performed at each Boston-area Lit Crawl since then.
In keeping with our name, Here Comes Everybody, we are committed to bringing our performances to everybody and to non-traditional performance spaces.
These have included cemeteries; the streets of Dublin and Cambridge; naval vessels; private houses; gardens; public parks; a brewery; libraries; tents; lecture halls; classrooms; a former bank vault; a barbers’ shop; a hat shop and a comic shop, as well as conventional theatres and concert halls.
During the pandemic of 2020 – 2022, in collaboration with the Irish Consulate General, Boston, we adapted our performances for Zoom, with actors and musicians performing remotely from their own homes and allowing us to reach a world-wide audience.
Our Zoom pandemic performances included The Uniquely Irish Humour of Flann O’Brien, Women’s Voices in Modern Irish Poetry, Brigid – Symbol of Feminine Energy and Renewal (for St Brigid’s Day, Feb 1, 2021), Finnegans Wake Made Easy! (repeated later for the 2021 international James Joyce conference), Salad Day, a one-act play by Deirdre Kinahan, and an adaptation of James Joyce’s short story, Ivy Day in the Committee Room (performed later as a staged reading in Dublin in 2023).
Our first Dublin Bloomsday was in 2013
Our first Dublin Bloomsday was in 2013
This led to further performances in Dublin for Bloomsday 2014, 2015, 2017 and 2019, mostly in collaboration with The James Joyce Centre.
In 2014, to mark the 100th anniversary of the publication of Dubliners, we performed short excerpts from each of the fifteen short stories on the steps of fifteen different Georgian houses on North Great George’s Street, the home of the James Joyce Centre.
In the spirit of Here Comes Everybody, we invited members of the audience to join us in each excerpt, providing them with lines to read their part of the script.
In 2022 and 2023, we reorganized into a registered not-for-profit corporation establishing a board of directors, a board of advisor and obtaining 501c(3) status. We set ourselves the goal of becoming Boston’s Irish Theatre Company, performing modern 21st century Irish drama as well as continuing our tradition of celebrating the work of James Joyce and other 20th-century Irish authors and playwrights.
In 2022 and 2023, we reorganized into a registered not-for-profit corporation establishing a board of directors, a board of advisor and obtaining 501c(3) status. We set ourselves the goal of becoming Boston’s Irish Theatre Company, performing modern 21st century Irish drama as well as continuing our tradition of celebrating the work of James Joyce and other 20th-century Irish authors and playwrights.
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