Listening to Ireland

Jenni Jordan went to Ireland with a pretty clear picture of what she thought it would be like. What she experienced was a much deeper and richer version than she imagined.

“I fell in love with the people, the culture, the land, the history, and the beautiful dialect,” said Jenni, whose Paternotte presentation during Alumnae Weekend 2026 explained how she listened to the places on her trip as a traveler, theater teacher, and as someone carrying her own family stories.

Jenni based her stay in Dublin, visiting the historic Christ Church Cathedral and taking in the ancient stories of the Hill of Tara and Newgrange World Heritage Site, and the human stories of The Irish Emigration Museum. She also examined theater’s place in Irish cultural history.

“As a theater person, part of how I experience travel is through performances, performance spaces, and the people who bring stories to life,” Jenni said. “Seeing theater in Dublin mattered to me, because performance is one of the ways Ireland tells its own story.”

She attended performances of The Crucible at The Gaiety Theatre and The Plough and the Stars at the Abbey Theatre and visited the Smock Alley Theatre/Gaiety School of Acting. She also took in Trinity College, the Book of Kells, the National Gallery of Ireland, and the home of Oscar Wilde before traveling northwest to Donegal County.

There, she stayed in the village of Glencolmcille — population 160 and chosen by Jenni because it evokes the landscape found in Brian Friel’s award-winning 1990 play Dancing at Lughnasa, set in Donegal County in the early 1930s.

“Being there made Dancing at Lughnasa feel less like a script and more like a living memory attached to a particular place, which is exactly the type of listening to Ireland this trip invited me to do,” said Jenni, who closed the trip with a visit to County Carlow, home to her great, great grandmother.

“In the end, the trip wasn’t just about seeing Ireland,” she noted. “It was about listening to it through Wilde’s complicated legacy in a polished Dublin townhouse, Friel’s memory-filled landscapes in Donegal, through a handful of sheep, missed buses, and rain-soaked walks that are now part of my own personal script. Like Dancing at Lughnasa, my version of this journey is a memory play — selective, emotional, and shaped as much by feeling as by fact, and it has quietly changed how I carry this place in my memory.”

Established by Trustee Nan Brewster Paternotte ’65 on the occasion of her 50th reunion in 2015, the Paternotte Family Faculty Travel and Study Endowment Fund supports Miss Hall’s faculty professional development in the form of summer travel.

• 2024 Donna Daigle + Ellie Kreischer

• 2022–23 Dr. Chris Himes

• 2019 Sue Lovell

• 2018 Rebecca Cook-Dubin P’24

• 2017 Vicky Biancolo P’16, P’20

• 2016 Ellie Kreischer