Ask Too Much Of Me by playwright Dylan Coburn Gray and artistic director Veronica Coburn is currently running on The Abbey Theatre’s Peacock Stage for the National Youth Theatre (NYT).

The play, which debuted Monday, August 19 and will run right through to Saturday August 24, is inclusive of not only its narrative, with LGBT+ issues cropping up throughout the script, but also in its casting, boasting a diverse crew of 16 young actors hailing from across the country all coming together on one stage for this production.

Sammy Cahn of Cabinteely Youth Theatre who plays the role of Sasha praises the National Youth Theatre stating that it has been “the one place [they] feel truly [sic] [themselves] outside of [their] own home.”

The play itself focuses on the impact of the 2018 reproductive rights referendum on a group of young Irish people living on the margins of society. Coburn Gray explains the story of the play:

“They’re squatting in some unspecified location in the city centre, and it’s about their lives, and how their lives mirror the political change that’s going on, and how you can find the big political moments that no one person was responsible for in the tiny moments that they go through every day.”

In relation to this mirroring of the political and the private sphere, Coburn Gray says, “voice and choice were bound up” in the referendum campaigns.

Gray says the arguments often centred on “who gets to be counted as credible and those were all issues that applied to young people and queer people more than others in certain senses – the right to have your experience counted as valid or intelligible.”

He cites these shared feelings of powerlessness as the purpose of writing about LGBT+ youth in both the political context of the time as well as the physical context of the squat within the piece. 

Ask Too Much Of Me is set to not only provide an exciting web of diverse narratives converging together on one stage but also introduce its audience to new and up and coming Irish talent that stretches beyond the Dublin border.

For those interested in seeing this production we suggest you act quickly as all dates have completely sold out bar the final show at 8 pm on Saturday, August 24 and the remaining tickets are selling fast! You can grab yours here.