Vincent Dowling, former artistic director of The Abbey, Ireland's national theater, has lived in the western Massachusetts hilltown of Chester for the last 20 years with his wife Olwen, daughter of the late Irish stage actor Dan O'Herlihy. A native Dubliner and fine actor, he founded a theater company in Chester and has most recently taken a revival of East Boston native Norman Corwin's play "The Rivalry," about the Lincoln-Douglas debate of 1858, on the road. We asked him for his list of best Irish plays. He insists against all evidence that Shakespeare was Irish, so we'll give him that one.

—Kevin Cullen, Globe Staff