Review: St. Patrick Returns for the Spirited Comedy of "Home Rule"

Home Rule

Written by Liam Gibbons

Directed by Francis Pacae-Nunez

Presented by Dragon Events LLC and FRIGID New York at UNDER St. Marks

94 St Marks Place, Manhattan, NYC

April 2-11, 2025

As a setting, wartime highlights divisions, and Liam Gibbons's dark comedy Home Rule, which takes place in 1920s Ireland during the War for Independence, uses its politically divided setting to examine divisions of sexuality, gender, religion, and family. With ghosts real and figurative, Home Rule takes a comedic look at identity and the disjunctions among internal experience, external self-presentation, and expectations around both. Home Rule's humorous story of possession is one of 63 shows at the 2025 New York City Fringe Festival, which runs through April 20th across four venues in Manhattan and one in Brooklyn.

Home Rule begins with Finn (Adriel Jovian) and Riley (Taegan Chirinos), a young couple from the small coastal town of Doagh, deciding to finally have sex with each other, leading to some effective physical comedy. The somewhat unusual location of their would-be tryst is an abandoned castle, once the site of a cathedral, which leads to a further complication even as Finn is not managing to go through with the act. Said complication arrives, accompanied by lightning and thunder, in the form of a spirit who claims to be St. Patrick and possesses Riley's body (an inversion, perhaps, of the consensual penetration of her body that she was seeking with Finn). Finn, as one might expect, has trouble convincing both local priest Father Mark (Nate Entz) and Riley's mother, Cara (Tatiana Graves-Kochuthara), of what has occurred, although, helped by Riley's change in voice and requests to be called "Paddy"–both of which can be read as queer symbolism–the idea of an exorcism is eventually raised. Enthusiastic IRA soldier Private Callahan, or Cal (Leonidus Gonzalez), who has been tasked with using the castle to watch for a very unlikely British invasion of the area, takes less convincing regarding Riley's condition, which transpires over the course of a funny scene between Jovian and Gonzalez: While more fearful of ghosts than the others to begin with, Cal is also quicker to see a politically useful potential in the situation.

The ghost's cross-gender possession of Riley and ability to hop bodies point to questions around (non-normative) identity, as do disagreements over whether the ghost is in fact a ghost (and if so, specifically St. Patrick's ghost) or a demon (such disagreements are also disagreements with someone's self-identification). Relatedly, we learn that the ghost passed through Finn but did not possess him because he was impure, and for more than just not being a virgin, as the others assume. Intersecting with these considerations, the characters ponder issues of (Catholic) guilt and whether you can in fact kill an idea (as well as if that is the sort of thing in which St. Patrick was engaged and whether his mission was political). St. Patrick's angry reminder that God promised him that the land would be free invites us to see parallels between the freedom of the land and freedom of the self, and Cara's costuming similarly invites a link between her (as a mother who wants to protect her daughter) and the land. By the end, Riley's personal familial loss, which is also the land's loss, comes to the center. All this said, the play keeps its focus on being funny, from Entz's drunken cynicism as Father Mark to Chirinos's possessed voice and impressively convulsive physicality when Riley is not in control of her own body, all culminating in an anarchic climax featuring the entire cast. With an undeniable sense of fun and cheek, Home Rule reminds us that (political) independence also includes rule over one's own body.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards

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