When Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia opened the doors of New York City Center in 1943, he was fulfilling a promise to New Yorkers that they could see world-class performances at affordable prices. It was all part of a plan to make New York the center of innovation in the worlds of dance, music, and theater. It was a promise made, a promise kept.

The Ferryman is set in rural County Armagh in Northern Ireland in late August 1981. It’s time for the harvest and a celebration, time for a festive family dinner punctuated with music and dancing. But before that happens, there is a prologue that takes place on a bleak street in Derry: Father Horrigan (Gerard Horan), a priest who knows the Carney family well, is called to a meeting with the sinister Mr Muldoon (Stuart Graham) who informs him that the body of Seamus Carney, who disappeared on New Year’s Day 1972, at the age of twenty, has been found in a peat bog in County Louth, shot in the back of the head as retribution for his defection from the IRA. The priest is instructed to take the message to the dead man’s family along with a warning—they are not to blame or bad mouth the IRA.