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Humiliated, sick, hungry—some of them drunk—the once-proud British redcoats kept their eyes down.

It’s 1833 in Friel’s fictional small town, Ballybeg, where a sweet, putrid smell rising from the potato fields forebodes famine and an ingress of redcoats threatens to blight the local heritage.

Just weeks earlier, redcoats had burned the U.S.

In the background, U.S. soldiers in blue fight off invading British redcoats.

It began with callbacks to the darkest days of American history — to redcoats sacking a young nation’s capital and a legacy of racist violence it has long struggled to overcome.