An Immersive Re-Creation of “The Dead”

The table was set for an old-fashioned Irish dinner party: white linen, cut-glass vases containing celery stalks and air-dried raisins. The meal, in a small tasting room in the West Village, was a rehearsal for an immersive re-creation of the holiday feast in James Joyce’s story “The Dead.” Beginning later this month, forty-two audience members a night will eat and drink along with the twelve cast members of “The Dead, 1904” as they take over the American Irish Historical Society, a nineteenth-century mansion overlooking Central Park, to stage one of the most famous parties in literature.