Ella! is written in the style of Magical Realism, with the faeries providing the other world perspective common in Celtic Irish thought and belief. Ella! is the story of Irish Literary Revivalist writer and revolutionary Ella Young, one of the intellectuals who taught the Irish people their Celtic heritage in order to lay the foundation for a successful revolution against England’s oppressive 700 year colonial rule. Ella was a storyteller, children’s book writer, poet, playwright, folklorist, feminist, revolutionary, druid, lesbian gunrunner for the IRA. She was one of the writers instrumental in the founding of the Abbey Theater in Dublin in order to produce the plays of the revivalist writers. She was a rival to William Butler Yeats for the love of the legendary beauty and actress Maud Gonne. Ella had an American student named Gavin Arthur who was the gay grandson of American President Chester Allan Arthur Jr. and is best known in California as “the astrologer of Height Ashbury” in the 1960’s who predicted the death in office of President John F. Kennedy, as documented in Herb Caen’s column in the San Francisco Chronicle. After the Irish Revolution, Ella emigrated to California and taught Celtic Studies at UC Berkeley. After her retirement, she moved to Oceano, California near the Dunes at Pismo Beach where Gavin had started a proto-hippy community called The Dunites that lived off the land in the Dunes. She became a teacher-philosopher and advisor to the arts community along the California coast in the 1930’s until her death in 1956, becoming friends with Ancil Adams, Robinson Jeffers, John Steinbeck, Earnest Hemmingway, and other luminaries of the movement. There are pictures taken by Ancil Adams of Ella in her Druid robes teaching the nature based ways of the Celts to the Dunites and the artists and writers who often visited. In later years, Gavin’s house in Height Ashbury became a crash pad for the early hippies where he taught the nature mysticism he learned from Ella, likely having a strong impact on the environmental aspects of the 60’s cultural revolution. The royalties from her books still go the Save The Redwoods League, the first organization she joined when she came to California.
The play traces Ella’s love affair with Maud Gonne, her rivalry with William Butler Yates, her dangerous work as a revolutionary and gun runner, to her disillusionment at the compromise that left the 6 counties of Northern Ireland in the hands of the British, including her home county of Antrim, an act that Ella saw as a betrayal of the revolution. Her wrenching decision to leave her beloved Ireland and emigrate to America was followed by a long and difficult re-envisioning of her passion for freedom and love of the land to embrace her new home of California and her advocacy for a revolution of a different kind. Running parallel to Ella’s personal story are the adventures of her beloved student Gavin Arthur and the young revolutionary fighter Patrick Finnegan.
