Like many young adults working in the arts, Luke Casserly spent time at his childhood home during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Unlike many other young adults, he wrote a beautiful play about it.
Distillation, Casserly’s taut, elegiac reminiscence about changing life in the Irish Midlands, amounts to far more than an amusing account of socially distant walks and family history delivered via a charming accent. It’s a one-man show, but with only 19 audience members seated at a large roundtable covered with bog soil, the effect is more like Casserly has invited you over for tea and a poetic TED Talk. Distillation may be a fine Irish tradition, but the reference here is not to whiskey but to perfume making, and the art of boiling a story down to its essence, so memories of the performance linger longer than the scent on your wrist.
Solas Nua, a D.C.-based nonprofit that promotes Irish arts and culture, commissioned Distillation in 2023 and welcomed Casserly for a developmental staging at the Stable last summer, but the play’s roots stretch far further, to those long, mid-pandemic walks on the peat bogs near his childhood home in County Longford, bogs finally allowed to lie fallow after decades of industrial peat harvesting.
A critically praised multidisciplinary performer, Casserly has won a series of honors related to arts and ecological practice, including a 2023 Next Generation Award from Ireland’s National Arts Council. Word that a small American theater troupe had commissioned him to write an immersive show about perfume and peat bogs intrigued many on the Emerald Isle. The Abbey, Ireland’s national theater cofounded by William Butler Yeats, came on board as a co-producer, and, along with diplomatic partners, helped Solas Nua arrange a North American tour that will take Casserly and his peat-covered roundtable from D.C. to Albany, Buffalo, and Toronto, and back again for another District run next year.
But before Distillation embarks on that theatrical journey, local audiences should take Casserly’s adroitly piloted trip through Ireland’s dirty rural past. The venue, as with two previous Solas Nua projects, is downtown’s Eaton Hotel. Rather than being lured to the rear bar, however, Distillation audiences take the elevator to the hotel’s library-like top-floor conference room and pull up a chair at a circular table covered with three-inches of fragrant, legally imported Irish peat. Once everyone is settled, the play begins with Casserly, dressed in a loose linen suit and Harry Potter-esque glasses, passing around handfuls of decomposing matter and inviting audiences to take a deep whiff.
Up until 2020, we learn, Casserly’s father worked for Bord na Móna, a semi-state company charged with harvesting fuel from Ireland’s bogs. As “Dad” explains in the play, he cut strips of decomposing plant matter and dried them in log-like clumps. While immensely cheaper than wood or gas, harvesting peat is a double-edged ecological disaster, emitting harmful aerosols when burned, but able to absorb harmful gases as a “carbon sink” when left intact. While some personal harvesting is still allowed, industrial practice is not, ending Casserly’s father’s career.
His father also raises cattle, just as his grandfather did, the herds not large enough to make money. What will happen to the family’s land—and the former peat bogs near it—are the questions that hang in the air like the smoky, mossy fragrance created by Cork-based perfumer Joan Woods for a sensory experience incorporated into the show.
Distillation may sound oddly specific, but what’s so wondrous about Casserly’s play is those specifics tap into relatable universals, cracking open a mental space for audiences to think about their own relationships to familial traditions, family-owned homesteads, and the 21st-century siren song to take better care of the planet.
I thought, for example, of my father’s birthplace on a Chesapeake Bay tributary north of Baltimore, in a shack without indoor plumbing. For my paternal grandparents, crabbing and fishing were a means of collecting dinner. A college-educated generation later, crabbing has evolved into a pastime, but in an ecosystem far more fragile. I thought also of my maternal great-grandmother, a mother of 10 who became a crane operator during World War II, and kept working until the steel mills in Baltimore started shutting down, gathering rust along the waterfront.
The world changes. Industry changes. The landscape changes.
“I began to see the landscape as a vulnerable thing, unable to speak up for itself,” Casserly says.
I’m sure Greta Thunberg would agree. But Casserly would rather speak to a handful of theatergoers than the United Nations General Assembly. Distillation is not the theatrical equivalent of doomscrolling. What Solas Nua is offering, in addition to tea and tiny vials of Woods’ perfume, is a space to think and a sense of hope.
Birds chirp from hidden speakers. Smoke rises from the center of the table. Visions of flowers arise from surprising places. Like a priest exhorting his parishioners to go in peace, Casserly sends audiences out into spring night renewed. “In the same way that my Dad hopes for me to look after this place when he’s gone, you are now invited to look after your little piece too,” he says.
That “piece” could be the Eau de Ireland perfume sample, your family’s ancestral land, or a nearby park in need of a little TLC.
“Let it travel out from here, across the city, and further afield,” Casserly says. “I’m certain it’s in safe hands now.”
Presented by Solas Nua, Distillation, written and performed by Luke Casserly, runs through May 12 at Eaton Hotel; and from May 15 to 19 at Round House Theatre. solasnua.org. $45.