Wild Irish Geese

August 4 – 29. Previews: August 4, 5
Opening Night: Thursday, August 6
Tuesday to Saturday at 6 pm With an added Monday performance on August 24th

Wild Irish Geese returns to the 4th Line stage this summer, back by popular demand after a sold-out premiere in 2025 and carrying with it the kind of local history that still echoes loudly if anyone’s willing to listen.

Written by Megan Murphy and directed by Kim Blackwell, this sweeping outdoor production revisits the 1820s emigration scheme led by Peter Robinson, which brought hundreds of Irish families to Canada as they fled famine, poverty, and the slow suffocation of having nowhere left to go. More than 2,000 settlers arrived in Scotts Plains — the place that would eventually become Peterborough — and began the brutal, uncertain work of starting over.

That’s the heart of Wild Irish Geese: migration, hardship, survival, and the uneasy promise of a new life in a land that offered hope but came wrapped in the realities of a complex colonial world. The play reflects on the courage it took to leave, the losses carried across the ocean, and the stubborn resilience required to carve out even the most fragile beginning.

What keeps the story from feeling like a museum plaque with better lighting is its human scale. This is history with dirt on its hands — people uprooted by desperation, trying to build something lasting out of uncertainty, grief, and willpower. The descendants of those emigrants now number in the tens of thousands, both in the Peterborough region and far beyond, which gives the story a resonance that is anything but remote.

The production features musical direction and original compositions by Justin Hiscox, Indigenous Story Consultation by Patti Shaughnessy, costume design by Bonnie Garland, set design by Michelle Chesser, choreography by Monica Dottor, fight direction by Edward Belanger, intimacy direction by Greg Carruthers, and sound design by Steáfán Hannigan.

Wild Irish Geese runs August 4 to 29, with previews on August 4 and 5, opening night on Thursday, August 6, and performances Tuesday through Saturday at 6 p.m., plus an added Monday performance on August 24.

A sold-out success the first time around, it now returns not simply because audiences liked it, but because some stories deserve a second telling — especially when they help explain how a place came to be what it is.

Megan Murphy, “Wild Irish Geese,” 2025. Photo by Wayne Eardley, Brookside Studio.