David Cregan O.S.A., Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in Theatre, and an Associate Dean in the College of Professional Studies at Villanova University. He spent four years working as a professional actor in New York City. He earned his doctorate from the Samuel Beckett School of Drama at Trinity College in Ireland. He also has an M.A. in Irish Studies from the Catholic University of America, an M.Phil in Irish Theatre and Film from Trinity, and an M.Div. from the Washington Theological Union.

In the new play Safe House by playwright Enda Walsh and composer Anna Mullarkey, the audience is given access to the vast complexity of the inner life of Grace, portrayed by actor Kate Gilmore. Grace is the only character on stage, and throughout Grace reckons with the aftermath of the traumatic impact of an expansively dysfunctional family in the West of Ireland in the 80s and 90s. While Grace is the subject of the performance, the object of her experience is manifested in the eclectic paraphernalia of her life, holding together a pastiche of personal experience of which she cycles through in attempting to create a better future than her troubled past.  The performance supports the miscellaneous clutter of the inner life through music, pop culture, film and orchestral composition as a sort of DNA for the fullness of Grace. The result is a collision of memory which seems to have as its purpose a reconstruction of her troubled life through the process of releasing of her familial and cultural dysfunction in order to assert her own agency and move forward.  

In this paper I will map out the inner pathway that Grace follows in order to process her past. Identifying the location/setting and the time period in which the play is set. In other words, Grace sets out to transform the communal, social, and political context of her life, in favor of what is best for her. I will frame this within the conference theme by describing this process as the movement from the restrictive and violent world of political/economic Empire in Ireland and across the world, in juxtaposition to what modern philosophy asserts as the turn to the subject: thus shifting Empire inward towards the priority of advancing the subjective experience of the individual in order to heal from collective expectation and its accompanying trauma.