The Smuggler

It’s 2025. Tim Finnegan is an Irish immigrant trying to make it as a writer on Amity, an affluent summer colony in Massachusetts, where tensions flare between the migrant and local communities after a fatal car crash. When he loses his job as a bartender and his two-year-old son Eddie falls ill, Tim gets drawn into the dark underbelly of the island. The Smuggler examines how far one man will go to restore his self-respect and asks the question, “What does it mean to be an American citizen?”

Written entirely in rhymed verse, Ronán Noone won the Best Playwright Award for this gripping, playful, and strikingly original work at New York’s Origin Theatre’s 1st Irish Festival in 2019. This production made its Off-Broadway premiere at Irish Repertory Theatre in 2023, earning acclaim for its environmental staging, unflinching relevance, and Michael Mellamphy’s tour-de-force performance.

Directed by two-time Tony Award-winning producer Conor Bagley, and produced by New York entrepreneur Jessica M. DeLucia, The Smuggler stars Michael Mellamphy – known for his work on US television, the New York stage, and as the cheeky outlaw Seán MacGuire in the global video game phenomenon Red Dead Redemption 2.

Duration: 85 mins approx

“Terrific. Mellamphy is a dynamic presence, shifting easily among male and female roles and a variety of accents, while showing off some damn impressive cocktail-mixing moves” – The New Yorker

“It’s quite a feat to hold an audience’s attention for a full 85 minutes, and Mellamphy manages it with impressive physicality, dexterity, and magnetism…Rarely has a man’s moral decline been made so purely entertaining to watch” – Theatermania

“While it’s an awful lot of fun watching Finnegan’s moral decline, this one-man tour de force has a serious underlying social commentary” – MV Times