What Shall I Do For Pretty Girls?
by Don Nigro

This long one act is actually a full evening of theatre.

The great Irish poet William Butler Yeats was in love for most of his life with the passionate, stubborn, brilliant, and impossible political activist Maud Gonne, first the mistress of a married French politician and then the wife of an Irish rebel who was later executed.

When this play opens, Mr. Yeats, now past fifty, is tired of waiting, and braves crossing the channel to France in time of war to ask Maud to marry him one last time, and then, when refused, to ask for the hand of her beautiful but troubled daughter Iseult.

When both refuse him, he surprises them by marrying another young woman, Georgie Hyde-Lees, who finds on her wedding night that the only way to keep him interested is to become the conduit for the occult revelations of a bizarre collection of spooks.

But Yeats is still obsessed with Maud and in love with Iseult, and Georgie can't seem to get them out of her life, or out of their bedroom, where it's pretty crowded already with all those talking spooks.

A very funny, very dark, and ultimately moving examination of the nature of love, and how it's manifested in three very strong, very different women and the frustrated poet who's caught between them.

In What Shall I Do For Pretty Girls?

& Other Plays.