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As Jennifer Johnston’s novels continue to be the focal point of critical attention, her plays have been largely neglected. This article attempts to read Johnston’s two less noticed plays  The Desert Lullaby  and  Moonlight and Music  from the perspective of trauma studies and to explore how trauma and silence are psychologically, culturally, and socially imposed on women. In both plays, Johnston takes on women’s domestic traumas – death and incest in the former and sexual abuse and silence in the latter – that have been tabooed for so long in Ireland. Both plays expose how psychological pathology, gender, and culture undermine women’s lives and oppress their voices. By uncovering the hidden traumas and their devastating effects on women’s lives, Johnston breaks the silence imposed by the perpetrators and society. Rereading Johnston’s plays thirty years later is to acknowledge her pioneering work of staging women’s domestic trauma through dramatic experiments of narratives, monologues, and juxtaposition of the past and the present.

Domestic traumas in two plays by Jennifer Johnston