Returning to the International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival after a four-year hiatus, Canadian playwright and performer Rob Salerno provokes this year’s audience with his one-man show First Day Back.  The production marks Salerno’s second with the festival, making its premiere in the basement of Dublin’s Outhouse, where the leading man conjures a high-school classroom for a set which includes both stage and house.  Featuring an array of characters all embodied by Salerno, the drama captures a group-counseling session held in response to the suicide of one of the school’s students.  Where killer is victim and victim killer, Salerno depicts adolescence…

Following the recent debut of their first full drama Beasts, fledgling company Home You Go Productions premieres its second play Blind Date in the back half of the 12th Annual International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival.  Written and directed by Colette Cullen, the show sits at a digestible 60 minutes with two separate acts and no intermission.  As the title suggests, the show’s content concerns dating, specifically the awkward world of blind dating.  Though Cullen halves her opus in two distinct experiences, the acts speak to each other in startlingly parallel ways, and they colour one another with nuance that would…