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.