Marina Carr

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Marina Carr (born 1964) is an Irish playwright.

Born in County Offaly, Carr attended University College Dublin before holding posts as writer-in-residence at the Abbey Theatre and Trinity College Dublin. She served as Heimbold Professor of Irish Studies at Villanova University in 2003. Her award-winning plays—largely poetic tragedies of rural Irish domestic life—have been produced around the world.

Like the works of several other contemporary Irish playwrights, Carr's plays frequently include instances of black humor and severe physical brutality. She is distinguished, however, most notably by the fact that several of her plays are filled with classical Greek allusion or are loose retellings of classical Greek myths.

In Carr's early work, she experiments with style as she seeks to find her own. Low in the Dark (1989), her first play, is an absurdist piece in which gender roles and misconceptions are farcically addressed. The style reflects her early interest in fellow Irish playwright Samuel Beckett. Carr's next few experiments are The Deer Surrender (1990), This Love Thing (1991), and Ullaloo (1991).

Her next play, The Mai (1994), won Best New Play from the Dublin Theatre Festival and marked a shift in Carr's writing style. Though it is not an adaptation of a Greek play, it has distinct classical resonances, rising from questions of truth, legacy/heredity, and fate. The same can be said of her next play, Portia Coughlan (1996). Her other works include By the Bog of Cats… (1998), a retelling of Euripides' Medea; On Raftery's Hill (2000); Ariel (2002), a retelling of Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis extended into the aftermath shown in Aeschylus' Oresteia; and Woman and Scarecrow (2006).